Anytime, any place, anywhere Yvonne Nobis, Head of Science Information Services

Why? Providers of expensive content Quality Library websites not the starting point for research Authoritative content Provide proper citation skills Research skills support Barriers broken down in virtual libraries Infinitely superior to GOOGLE and GOOGLE SCHOLAR

What is Acknowledgment of the shift from physical libraries to the web Easy to use - searching is by subject not by library Resource discovery (using Cross search) User guides at each subject level Contextualisation - real time research information provided in context Multiple RSS feeds – more than one source for each subject Delicious Local focus (reading lists & local author publications) Collaborative effort –trying to bring information specialists together

Why Drivers 1 : Fear! Become relevant or become redundant OCLC 2006 College Students’ Perceptions of the Libraries and Information Resources 89 per cent of college students use search engines to begin an information search (while only 2 per cent start from a library web site) 93 per cent are satisfied or very satisfied with their overall experience of using a search engine Search engines fit college students’ life styles better than physical or online libraries and that fit is almost perfect’ College students still use the library, but they are using it less (and reading less) since they first began using internet research tools

Why The environment that library users operate in has changed in recent years. Behaviours and expectations have been reconfigured in a network environment as more of what people do enters a network space. Discovery happens elsewhere: People discover items of interest in a variety of ways: on search engines,in their RSS aggregators, in the resource networks created on social network sites, in consumer recommendations, on collaborative bookmarking sites, in reading and course lists, and so on. Increasingly, we cannot expect users to seek out individual Web sites or resources. In the flow: Now that readers and writers increasingly organize their work in network environments, we must build library services around their workflow (or learnflow, or researchflow, or…). Information is abundant; attention is scarce: As resources, tools, and environments proliferate so does the attention available for any single one of them decline. Dempsey, Lorcan “Reconfiguring the Library Systems Environment.” Guest editorial. portal: Libraries and the Academy, 8,2 (April). E-print available online at:

Why Drivers 2: Changing expectation of the “customer” now “the net gen user” JISC/CIBER briefing paper 2008: The Information behaviour of the researcher of the future Their (libraries) traditional role as intermediaries, helping users to navigate large and complex library systems, is being threatened by services, like Google, that seem to offer almost unlimited information choice and bypass the library’.The implications of a shift from the library as a physical space to the library as virtual digital environment are immense and truly disruptive. Library users demand 24/7 access, instant gratification at a click, and are increasingly looking for `the answer’ rather than for a particular format: a research monograph or a journal article for instance. So they scan, flick and `power browse’.

Why Drivers 3: If it’s on the web, it’s free! Problems with user perception of information delivery – many local users were not aware of the fact that they were using library resources when accessing subscription information on the web. This attitude is not restricted to Cambridge!

Why The (in)visibility of the Library and of science in particular… Ithaka An important lesson is that the library is in many ways falling off the radar screens of faculty. Although scholars report general respect for libraries and librarians, the library is increasingly disintermediated from their actual research process. Many researchers circumvent the library in doing their research, preferring to access resources directly. Researchers no longer use the library as a gateway to information, and no longer feel a significant dependence on the library in their research process. Although the library does play essential roles in this process, activities like paying for the resources used are largely invisible to faculty. In short, although librarians may still be providing significant value to their constituency, the value of their brand is decreasing. As our findings make clear, however, despite this growing significance of information to scientists, the role of the library is diminishing in importance fastest amongst this group. Key Stakeholders in the Digital Transformation in Higher Education Ihaka.org

Why Drivers 4: Google is too easy to use The JISC/CIBER study highlighted worrying trends concerning information skills CIBER deep log studies show that, from undergraduates to professors, people exhibit a strong tendency towards shallow, horizontal, `flicking’ behaviour in digital libraries. Power browsing and viewing appear to be the norm for all. The popularity of abstracts among older researchers rather gives the game away. Society is dumbing down. Erosion of research skills

Why Drivers 5: “The unknown unknowns” Students- don’t know where to start – only use google/reading lists Library staff often have to offer support across multiple subjects Researchers – need know what resources are available, may need help with choosing where to publish

Why Local Research Central Science Library Review respondents – clear preference for electronic data Physical library visits were a last resort (the one exception was undergraduate text books) Visits to Heads of Departments in the Schools of Biological and Physical Sciences and the School of Technology

What next? In progress Collaborative filtering – if you liked this, you might like... “everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask” camtasia Future developments Plagiarism RAE no more – h-index; researcher support; new models of publishing Open access / institutional repository M-user More better focused tailored support

Online 24/7 Google Generation WhyWhy? Google Scholar Expensive Content Blogs Learning Experience Wikipedia Facebook Libraries What? Social Networks Information Retrieval Digital Natives Authority Virtual Libraries Participation Rich User Experience Libraries Instant Gratification ‘to facebook’ Google CIBER/JISC Academic Research Plagiarism Web 2.0 Social Networking