Well, then sit there and mope, and let the library install a Starbucks in the stacks. That is going to happen." So wrote a "professor wishing for more help" on August 22, 2011 in a posting to the Inside Higher Ed article "What Students Don't Know" by Steve Kolowich that summarized the outcomes of the research project ERIAL-Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries. The unnamed professor was lamenting the failure at his or her college for librarians to get to where the students are and conversely for the students to get to speak with the librarians. The only way the two would meet, s/he seemed to be suggesting, would be for the space the students were sitting in to be somehow-TARDIS-style-beamed into the space the librarians were hanging (or hiding?) out in. Happily the professor's cry did not go unheard. Many posted in response, including Barbara Fister (Academic Librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College and writer of the Inside Higher Ed's "Library Babel Fish" column) who appreciated the "geospatial sense" as key to learning. At Gustavus Adolphus a large lab is provided that can accommodate that interaction of students and librarians. A good few posters thought the "What Students Don't Know" article only told them what they knew already (and even had known for decades). Still, the fact the postings in total amounted after only 48 hours to many times the length of the original, already long article is a sure indicator of the importance to the community of the findings of the ERIAL project. It's not quite the first Library Information Science (LIS) research project to be driven by an anthropological emphasis, but its refusal to engage in any ethnocentrism in favor of one or the other body allows it to uncover trends and conclusions that would otherwise have been easily missed, not least the tension between
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