If I found it in one database, I'll try the search in some other databases and see what i come up with there. I might look in the government pages or yellow pages to see if there's some local agency or organization that would have the expertise or resources to answer the question. It's a good way to force yourself to stretch your reference muscles and discover the reference sources you didn't realize you had. Which is a pity, because it separates the person who's designing the interface from the users of the system. Some things I have learned about our students, by watching the way they look for stuff, have important service implications for us.
Students seem to prefer to work in pairs or groups.
That has implications in terms of both space allocation and noise. Watch people as they approach the web or any database, and you will realize that many of them do NOT want to read text, and do NOT want to scroll down the screen. All they want to do is type what they want in a box and get it. That has obvious implications for the way we design search interfaces. Above all, it means we are going to want to put a searchbox in plain site and make the whole site keyword searchable.