I think you meant "siezed the opportunity" rather than "ceased"? Though on context the latter is ironic... - Cameron Neylon

Yes, of course I meant "seized". And "friend or foe" in the title is also not really the best description, because this is rather about the disconnect of scientists and librarians. - Martin Fenner

The word is "seized". "Neither leisured foreigner seized the weird heights." - Ruchira S. Datta

[stupid comment deleted] Pay me no mind, I've not had my coffee yet. - Bill Hooker

Martin: What I was trying to get at in my muddled tweet was that users want to get directly to specific resources that they use frequently. That's good; nothing from either publisher or library should intervene in that space where you are trying to get something done. To me, it is a good thing that you go directly to PubMed and to specific journal pages. I am aware that the library community feels that fosters the idea that all of this is free and diminishes the credit that they should receive for ensuring that you have access to that resource, but in my mind, the point is to facilitate the researcher's thinking and workflow. - Jill O'Neill

Jill, completely agree. But maybe libraries should put up more valuable resources so that researchers go to their webpages. And publishers and other information providers should think more about libraries and not just users. An invisible library works for many things but this might be dangerous in the long run. - Martin Fenner from iPhone

I agree with your points in your post that there are constraints on the services and databases we offer. I should probably post a blog response to this, as there are several different reasons why. Libraries have to serve a wide variety of people, and if you happen to be in a group that's outside the "mean" you'll get less service and/or attention. The mean can be an audience (undergrad v. grad) a discipline (science v. non-science) or familiarity with new technology. Along with this is the promotion of content directly to users, usually from publishers, and many times I have to compete with that to get my user's attention. So we try to do all of the things you mention in your post but the message doesn't get to everyone. - Elizabeth Brown

Growing list of blog posts about scientists and librarians. (Incomplete) list here: http://network.nature.com/people... - Martin Fenner

More blog posts on scientists and librarians: http://undergraduatesciencelib... and http://kraftylibrarian.com/... - Martin Fenner

I really really love that there's so much discussion about this. - Stephanie•CogSciLibrarian