Already the parts of our collections that are not included in online catalogs get less use each year. And already faculty are concerned about poorly researched papers written late at night after a session logged on to a full-text database. And the networked user wants information any time. Network activity levels don't correspond to normal staff work hours. Networked users want access and need support 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
People behave differently when they're at the other end of a network connection.
The computer makes the connection to us more impersonal but also more direct. A user may be having problems accessing resources because of a weak search interface, a poor network connection, or a wrongly configured desktop machine, but chances are that the library will be considered responsible for all of these. In a series of conversations that we held over the past year with faculty from all disciplines at my university we heard two often conflicting viewpoints. Perhaps the biggest challenge for today's research libraries is to steer a middle course between these two extremes. Enough about users for a moment.