I've been tracking my library use for the past five years, and I can unequivocally say that the only time I've used a library catalog was to see if my library held a book I'd found using other resource discovery tools.
Same thing for journal articles. The only time I consult online library resources is to get a full text copy of an article I've located through some non-library means.
I'm a librarian. I'd imagine this is even more common among non-librarians.
Bernie Sloan
--- On Thu, 5/27/10, Ed Jones <ejones_at_NU.EDU> wrote:
> From: Ed Jones <ejones_at_NU.EDU>
> Subject: [NGC4LIB] Not sure what this means
> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> Date: Thursday, May 27, 2010, 12:35 PM
> I'm not sure what this means, but I
> thought I would recount it, since I suspect my experience is
> not that uncommon among contemporary researchers.
>
> I received my weekly e-mail bulletin from the Times
> Literary Supplement this morning. Browsing its contents, I
> came on a summary concerning a published collection of old
> photographs of London. Clicking on it, I was taken to
> the corresponding review in the TLS. The review
> mentioned by title a 17-volume 1902 survey of life in London
> and, curious, I copied and pasted the title into my
> browser's Google Books search box to see what I would
> find. It returned the complete set, readable online
> since they fall within the public domain. This all
> took less than a minute from opening the e-mail to perusing
> a volume in the set. I've grown so used to such
> sequences, that I had to stop to consider how remarkable it
> was.
>
> I know this has been said before, but none of this involved
> a library, much less a library catalog. Since the
> library and its catalog are the primary focus of my working
> life, this concerns me (to say the least). Over the
> last few years, I have found the library increasingly
> marginalized in my own research. Several years ago I
> loaded my library's LibX edition to my browser, and since
> then my forays into my library's resources occur primarily
> when my Web or Google Scholar searches provide a link
> (thanks to LibX) to a local copy of a subscription resource
> or offer an OPAC search as an alternative. Most of the
> resources I use now, however, are non-subscription web
> resources. I'm of two minds on this. As a
> librarian, I'm alarmed; as a researcher, I'm thrilled.
>
> Ed Jones
> National University, San Diego
>
Received on Thu May 27 2010 - 13:37:33 EDT