DO WORKSTATIONS WORK TOO WELL - AN INVESTIGATION INTO LIBRARY WORKSTATION POPULARITY AND THE PRINCIPLE OF LEAST EFFORT

Library workstations, with their colorful screens, menu options, datab ases, CD-ROMs, and other bells and whistles, lull users into trusting that they provide one-stop reference shopping covering all time period s for everything from journal citations to technical reports and paten ts. The Library has promoted workstation access and ease of use to the point of luring patrons away from other, possibly more appropriate, p rint indexes. In turn, have these workstations, aided by the ''Princip le of Least Effort'', changed the nature of how research is performed in academic libraries? A number of statistical data point to increased dependence on workstations at the Chemistry Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. These and other statistics are exami ned to determine the changing nature of library research.