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This article begins with an analysis of Questia’s online collection of digitized books and articles. Although the collection is not found to be a strong one, Questia’s strength lies in its ability to utilize the digital format to overcome many of the barriers and inconsistencies that undergraduate students encounter in a traditional brick‐and‐mortar academic library. Librarians can learn a lot from Questia and perhaps use that knowledge to improve their own services.

The purpose of this paper is to review the book Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester edited by Nancy Fried Foster and Susan Gibbons.

The review first examines the methods used in the Rochester study, and then considers the conclusions for their local implications as well as their meaning for the library profession.

The Rochester study should serve as a wake‐up call for librarians that imagine they understand their user‐base. Over and over again in this book the authors note how much they learned about the students after studying them systematically and how surprising they found the results. It seems unlikely that the Rochester experience is unique.

The transformation that took place at the University of Rochester Libraries should serve as an example for the profession as a whole.

The purpose of this paper is to review the purpose, methods, and selected results of a study of faculty work practices, especially as they bear on the creation, location, and use of grey literature and the design and use of institutional repositories.

Based on a work‐practice study of faculty members and researchers at the University of Rochester. The methodology used videotaped interviews to record and analyze how participants accomplish such tasks as using web‐based research and writing tools, organizing books and papers, and staying current.

Reviews six key research findings related to the understandings and attitudes faculty members hold regarding institutional repositories and the role of librarians in developing institutional repository collections. Explains why librarians have found it difficult to attract faculty participation from the perspective of user needs and work practices.

The study is based on field research with a small number of participants in six departments across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Access to faculty participants was limited.

Recommends new strategies for institutional repository design, recruitment of content, and outreach by librarians based on the six key research findings. Proposes an expanded role for librarians as liaisons to faculty who wish to share their work using the library's repository system.

The paper presents original research that addresses a current problem in the area of institutional repositories: why faculty members have not taken full advantage of new technologies that help them share their work. It lists the practical steps that librarians can take to improve faculty participation in repository projects and to increase access to grey literature for all scholars.

The purpose of the paper is to show how an institutional repository can be successfully created by university libraries with limited financial and technological resources.

In this paper the library's experience creating an institutional repository despite financial and technological limitations is recounted.

The paper finds that a serviceable repository may be created by focusing on its critical elements, and adapting existing resources, including a proprietary system currently used for other digital resources.

The paper shows that librarians should not assume that open‐source systems are the only vehicles for providing institutional repositories, or that such a service is necessarily beyond their capabilities.

Academic libraries do not have to follow an involved, idealized process to create an institutional repository based upon open‐source software. Systems already at hand, even if proprietary, may be adapted and real‐world limitations surmounted to create such a resource.

Phase two of the JISC funded Library Impact Data Project (LIDP) identified low library usage amongst Chinese students in comparison to their UK peers. Further research was needed to help the authors delve deeper and find out the story behind the data. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A questionnaire was distributed to all international students in the Business School to learn about their information retrieval behaviours. The response was high but the survey was deliberately designed to only produce quantitative data, and the paper highlights the limitations of this data. More research using qualitative ethnography research techniques was needed to gather qualitative data to create a broader picture of student practice. Methods utilised included the retrospective process interview and cognitive mapping (both used by Andrew Asher in the ERIAL project). Questions from the survey were sometimes used as prompts in the qualitative process.

The data are still to be coded and analysed but one of the main findings is that students are unaware of the research help that they can get from their academic library. Ethnographic research methods gave more inroads into finding the story behind the LIDP than quantitative research methods.

Ethnographic research in libraries is still in its early days in the UK. It could help those library professionals who are hoping to practice similar research methods.