The changing nature of how students do research and the future of academic libraries

As developers of library software and information discovery tools, one of the things that frustrates us the most is the seemingly ever-widening gap between the traditional academic expectations of our librarians and the impatient, "good-enough", just get it done desires of our students. We spend a lot of time and expend a lot of effort trying to sort that out and what usually happens is compromise and a product that really isn't what we had in mind.

Much has been written about this issue - some right here on these pages. To add even more fuel to the fire, I stumbled across "Twenty-nine reports about the future of academic libraries" over at Confessions of a Science Librarian, and I offer them here. Number 22 was particularly enlightening. I hope to synthesize all this data soon and write a summary for our staff and you.

• Ithaka’s 2006 Studies of Key Stakeholders in the Digital Transformation in Higher Education
  
  
• How Readers Navigate to Scholarly Content: Comparing the changing user
  behaviour between 2005 and 2008 and its impact on publisher web site design and function
  
  
• College Students' Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources
  
  
• Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World
  
  
• Generations Online in 2009
  
  
• The Future of the Internet III
  
  
• Networked Workers: Most workers use the internet or email at their jobs, but they say these technologies are a mixed blessing for them
  
  
• Use of Cloud Computing Applications and Services
  
• 2009 Horizon Report
  
  
• Scholarly Information Practices in the Online Environment: Themes from the Literature and Implications for Library Service Development
  
  
• National Consultation on Access to Scientific Research Data
  
  
• Agenda for Developing E-Science in Research Libraries
  
  
• Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources
  
  
• Skills, Role & Career Structure of Data Scientists & Curators: Assessment of Current Practice & Future Needs
  
  
• Semantic Enrichment: The Key to Successful Knowledge Extraction from STM Literature
  
  
• No Brief Candle: Reconceiving Research Libraries for the 21st Century
  
  
• Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization
  A White Paper
  
  
• A Survey of Digital Humanities Centers in the United States
  
  
• Library as Place: Rethinking Roles, Rethinking Space
  
  
• Current Models of Digital Scholarly Communication: Results of an Investigation Conducted by Ithaka for the Association of Research Libraries
  
  
• The Next Generation of Academics: A Report on a Study Conducted at the University of Rochester
  
  
• Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester
  
  
• The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2008
  
  
• Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the costs and benefits
  
  
• More People, Not Just More Stuff: Developing a New Vision for Research Cyberinfrastructure
  
  
• Our Cultural Commonwealth: The report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences
  
  
• Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
  
  
• Transformational Times:. An Environmental Scan Prepared for the ARL Strategic Plan Review Task Force
  
  
• Finding Context: What Today’s College Students Say About Conducting Research in the Digital Age