The University of Rochester’s River Campus
Libraries are known as innovative and forward
thinking, especially in the areas of reference outreach,
online catalogs, institutional repositories,
and Web-based services. Still, the library staff
wanted to do more to reach students and their instructors
in support of the university’s educational
mission. But to do more, we realized we needed
to know more about today’s undergraduate students—
their habits, the academic work they are
required to do, and their library-related needs.
In particular, we were interested in how students
write their research papers and what services,
resources, and facilities would be most useful to
them. As Katie Clark, director of the Carlson
Science and Engineering Library, remarked early
in this project, “Papers happen,” but we did not
know how they happen.
Thus, in the summer of 2004, a group of
librarians and the River Campus Libraries’
lead anthropologist met at a park on the shore
of Lake Ontario for lunch and a discussion
of some research we might do to enlarge our
knowledge of undergraduate work processes.
Many of us had participated in a previous
study, supported by a grant from the Institute
for Museum and Library Services, to examine
the work practices of faculty members in
order to build a better institutional repository
(Foster and Gibbons 2005). Based on the success
of that study, we decided to use similar
anthropological and ethnographic methods
to examine how undergraduate students write
their research papers. The information collected
in this study would guide the libraries’ efforts
to improve library facilities, reference outreach,
and the libraries’ Web presence.
