This article describes the results of a survey of seven academic disciplines. The survey showed that all respondents, regardless of academic discipline, consult a narrower range of materials than was expected and regularly consult older published materials. Less surprisingly, respondents expressed a desire for simpler and more integrated search systems.
What value do campus scholars in different disciplines place on browsing the stacks? Do they prefer print or electronic resources? How important is the ready availability of collections with significant retrospective coverage or access to timely document delivery services? Do they rely on the library’s reference and instructional services? These are some of the questions that the library at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) set out to answer through research funded by a grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). With this support, the library intended “to develop a set of quantitative and qualitative measures for evaluating the performance and costs of research libraries collections and other types of services.”1 It also hoped to develop an operational understanding of how collections and other types of scholarly information are currently being used and the costs of providing that information.