From a practical viewpoint, it would be very difficult to engage in ethnography while engaged in any other full-time occupation. I have supervised postgraduate dissertations that have taken an ethnographic approach but these have been rare and usually only when the researcher has chosen to study their own daily context. True, ethnography usually demands at least a year in the field; that in itself means it is not at all practical for many researchers. This method is more likely to be applied in a doctoral study where the researcher has funding to engage in prolonged fieldwork with no other full time commitment; that is not intended to discourage the use of this method, just to remind you that, as tempting as it maybe, it is difficult to engage in this type of research anywhere other than your own social context. That said there are a number of examples of research studies which have taken an ‘ethnographic approach’ and applied the principles of the method to specific events and even systems as a means of evaluation. Othman (2004) applied the ethnographic process to the evaluation of the retrieval features of 12 databases. This may be and unorthodox application of the method but the study was a success and provided insights that may not have been possible applying any other method. Bouthillier (2000) carried out an ethnographic study of the nature and role of the public library in Quebec. Atton proposes the use of ethnography in collection development; the librarian already being an ‘insider’ can interpret and reflect on interaction with resources. ‘One way make sense of these resources is to attempt to understand how they are being used, and by what kinds of people, to undertake an ethnographic study of the resources as a prologue to acquiring them’ (1998, 154).