We are currently engaged in empirical studies of the use and management of paper and digital libraries in eight major US research universities. In each university, we interview the University Librarian, the Director of Academic Computing, and other senior academic administrators such as a Provost. The study is empirically anchored and we are reaching the end of our data collection phase. The results here are primarily descriptive and characteristic of our preliminary analysis. They sometimes offer quiet places for reflective reading, but are often used as warehouses in which faculty and students seek specific kinds of books or articles but read them elsewhere.
Academic libraries are also major expenditures for colleges and universities.
These investments get relatively little attention from professors and students. In the last 5 years libraries have been faced with rapidly rising prices for books and journals. The exciting elements in recent stories of academic publication have focused on digital libraries in various forms. There are two common approaches to defining digital libraries, one based on Internet services and the other based on library automation. These corpuses are growing at a relatively rapid rate, and include some standard versions of classical texts, preprints of academic articles, technical reports, published papers, diverse but incomplete sets of government reports, electronic journals, and a few new books.