These capabilities are certainly not expected from “conventional”, i.e. not wholly
digital, library services. The reason is clear. Expectations of digital libraries are
strongly coloured by experience with the ubiquitous digital information environment,
the world wide web. As Fast and Campbell (2004, p. 139) put it:
Web searching is shaping user expectations of what an information retrieval system looks
like, how it behaves, and how to interact with it ... .[Digital libraries] are now being used by
people who have extensive experience on systems that require almost no training, and which
produce immediate, if not completely satisfying, results.
The same idea is expressed in a more negative vein by Bell (2004):
[Library users are now] people who want fast, easy access to unlimited, full-text content using
interfaces that require no critical thought or evaluation.
More specifically, the influence is that of the major search engines, most notably
Google. Griffiths and Brophy (2005, p. 550), from a basis of detailed analyses of
students’ searching behaviour, conclude that