Research Practice and Research Libraries: Working toward High-Impact Information Services

The problem in a nutshell… Utopian e-research scenarios promoted decades ago may now be obtainable goals. They will be enabled by the interplay of technology and user behavior. We have a reasonable understanding of changing technology but a limited understanding of changing user behavior … and therefore a poor understanding of the interplay • in the actual activities of reading, experimenting, analyzing, interpreting and problem solving. • One problem is that much of our research doesn’t identify the features most likely to be explanatory and predictive, or indicate what interventions can make a real difference. • In what follows, I draw on our studies of scholarly information work over the past decade to discuss how information use is changing in the practice of science and scholarship and reflect on where research libraries can direc