Search

The article presents a review of several articles that stress what is best for the library user. In "Conduciveness to Scholarship: The Essence of Academic Library as Place," the authors survey and research the faculty on the University of Oklahoma in Norman to decipher their use of the library's physical space. The article "Finding Information in a New Landscape: Developing New Service and Staffing Models for Mediated Information Services," the authors include the survey they used to improve services, data supporting the changes they made and the cost data spreadsheet. The study "User Preferences in References Services: Virtual Reference and Academic Libraries" addresses user preferences for potentially competing methods or technologies for obtaining reference assistance.

The article examines technologies used to provide library patrons with the same kind of success in finding information as achieved with Google searching. It is recommended to simulate Google, and then move beyond Google. One technology that allows libraries to emulate the "do not make me think" environment provided by Google is federated searching. With this kind of searching, users can access article's indexes, the library's online catalog and locally developed or Web databases all at the same time. Another technology, faceted browsing or search clustering, allows the user to narrow down their search results contextually.