Putting Library Discovery Where Users Are

Background: Where To Embed Discovery And Why

The tradition of libraries as research mediators has clearly given way to a new reality of easy, convenient direct user searching. A 2002 report from the Pew Charitable Trust’s Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 73 percent of college students use the Internet more than their library when searching for information, while only nine percent use the library more than the Internet (Jones & Madden, 2002).

OCLC®¹’s 2005 Perceptions of Librarians and Information Resources study reported that 89 percent of undergraduate and graduate students use Web search engines to begin research, while only two percent of users began research on a library website (DeRosa et al., 2005). OCLC®’s 2010 Perceptions study reported that 83 percent of college students use search engines to begin information searches, and that zero percent begin searches at the library website. Further, the study found that “the number of college students using the library Web site declined” from 61 percent in 2005 to 57 percent in 2010 (DeRosa et al., 2010, p. 52), and that “college students feel that search engines trump libraries for speed, convenience, reliability and ease of use” (though “libraries trump search engines for trustworthiness and accuracy;” DeRosa et al., 2010, p. 54).