Stone buildings, cyberspace, and the library user

Although libraries provide quiet and well‐equipped places for students to seek and use information, the trend librarians are seeing is a decline in the number of people coming to the library. In contrast, they are seeing a dramatic increase in the use of remotely accessed research databases. From these two trends emerges the concept of disintermediation, where library users seek and retrieve information without the assistance of the librarian, and the realization that librarians are no longer present when users need help in developing successful search strategies and evaluating the information they find. Librarians are not present at that teachable moment. To overcome the effects of disintermediation, librarians need to evaluate their services and recreate their instructional strategies in innovative ways so that they are available to the users of information wherever those users are.