Information Seekers' Perspectives of Libraries and Librarians

This chapter explores the role of libraries and librarians from the perspective of the information seeker in general and from business school students in particular. In a recent article in First Monday , Keller et al. (2003) pose the question: “What is a library anymore, anyway?” The answer to this question would be “That depends.” It depends upon who you are asking and the perspective from which you are answering the question. The notion of perspective has been raised before in the library and information science literature. Zweizig (1976) noted that users were the focus of studies, they were examined from the perspective of “the user in the life of the library” rather than from the perspective of “the library in the life of the user.” More recently, Lipow (1999) noted that librarians discuss how to serve “remote users” when in fact it is the library that is remote to the user.