What are students saying about their reference needs?

Libraries and publishers rely on transactional data to support evidence-baseddecision making. However, by itself quantitative information does not provide a fullpicture. To anticipate the evolving needs of our audience we also need to hear from theindividual users themselves. In this article, I will review the findings from severalrecent examples survey-based research into the question of how students use referencematerials in and outside of their libraries. What are students actually saying abouttheir needs and preferences when it comes to reference? While some uses cases forreference are moving out of the library into the open web not all have. What we hearstudents say is that they continue to have an unmet need for long-form, contextualguidance. They say they have trouble locating this content, but that the library is thefirst place they look for it. This is a risk because if students cannot find in-depthsummary content in their library they will migrate to the open web where they lose thebenefits of librarian intermediation as both a curator of sources and as a guide viainstruction.