Went to an interesting presentation today from a couple of excellent salesmen. Telling us about and demonstrating Primo
http://www.exlibrisgroup.com/primo.htm

The idea behind this product (and other similar but not as good that I've seen), is to provide a one stop search. Instead of students (and academics) having to search the library catalogue, search various databases (possibly several), search the university's repositories, search this, search that - never mind the web and Google Scholar etc.

There are certain difficulties with such an approach (speed is often one as proprietary databases can't be pre-searched as Google does with the web), but Primo seems to address many of the other issues that are often raised (too many results on general searches, too limited search features).

It also has a lot of the social side of Web 2.0 stuff - tagging, rating, reviewing items. This could be particular useful as it's likely to be far too long before library management systems catch up with this.

Particularly new students want the social side and don't want the complexity of what they now face. They're used to Google and Flickr and the like. They're not used to (and don't seem to warm to) having to face an hour's training on where-to-begin-to-get-the-information-you-need-oh-and-by-the-way-this-isn't-half-of-it-but-we-don't-have-time-for-more.

We fear that the product is going to be horribly expensive (the salesmen have gone off now to work out a cost based on our particular details), but I'm increasingly of the opinion that we can't afford NOT to be buying into something like this or we're going to become increasingly irrelevant to and unused by students.

They're not interested in search like librarians. They're interested in find.