Here is a nice article in Information Research Vol. 9 No. 4, July 2004, by Brinley Franklin and Terry Plum.
Snippet of the abstract:
"This paper examines the methodology and results from Web-based surveys of more than 15,000 networked electronic services users in the United States between July 1998 and June 2003 at four academic health sciences libraries and two large main campus libraries serving a variety of disciplines.
Results from the Web-based surveys showed that at the four academic health sciences libraries, there were approximately four remote networked electronic services users for each in-house user. This ratio was even higher for faculty, staff, and research fellows at the academic health sciences libraries, where more than five remote users for each in-house user were recorded. At the two main libraries, there were approximately 1.3 remote users for each in-house user of electronic information."

Wow, after reading the article I am a little amazed. I had no idea that there were that many remote users of library resources. I knew there were a lot of remote users, but I had no idea that the percentage of remote users compared to in-house users was so high. It makes me think that in some ways the library web site is as important as the library building itself. More and more libraries must become more than just bricks and mortar place where books are kept. Having a web presence is critical. Not only is it critical to have one, but it is also essential that it is user friendly.

That sounds like a no brainer, but I can't tell you how many library web sites that I have been on where I am perplexed as to where to find information. Additionally, most of our users do not think or speak in the way librarians do. How many general library users knows what ILL means? How many people understand what exactly a database is? You would shocked to know that most users don't know what these things are and why they should use them. So you must design and word it at an end user level. I think I remember a journalism professor once telling me that the average newspaper is written at the 5th grade reading level to ensure that as many people as possible can read (and therefore buy) the newspaper. Same principal should be applied to a library web site. Once you have a web site that you think accomplishes that goal, don't forget you are probably going to have re-do it in year or two. Things change, user demands change, so must your web site.

Another point this article makes is "The fact that more literature in the medical sciences is available electronically may help to account for why medical library users, and especially faculty, staff, and fellows, choose to use electronic services remotely. They may find that virtually all of their information needs can now be addressed from outside the library. This may be a trend that will re-occur in other disciplines as more networked electronic resources become available in those disciplines."

I can see this as a possible can of worms for some research. A lot is available online, but everything is not online. For the most part an article written before 1997 is not going to be online unless the journal was in the forefront of electronic publishing and started slightly eariler or the journal has started adding their back content. The Journal of Biological Chemistry is a rare journal, their content goes all the way back to 1905 in PDF. Most journals simply do not do that. Their online content begins from when they decided to go online.

So, there are vasts amount articles before that are not online in any shape or form. Because users are so used to getting things electronically, are they more prone to ignore citations to articles not available online? I seem to think they are. In my time as a medical librarian I have been told by more and more patrons that they just want whatever is online. Whether their reasons are because they only want recent articles or they are lazy and don't want to photcopy, more people tell me to they just want something that is already full text online.

One has got to wonder that this phenomenon of "oh just give only online articles," is going to affect research in possibly a detrimental way. We all are reminded of the death of Ellen Roche, a healthy, 24-year-old volunteer in an asthma study at Johns Hopkins University. As in Information Today and The Baltimore Sun the doctor did what he thought was an adequate Medline search on PubMed (which only goes back to 1966). It turns out that a majority of the journal articles on hexamethonium inhalation lung injury were published in the 1950's before PubMed. Had this researcher gone and dug a little further back in the literature, had he gotten a librarian to do his research (which would have most likely indicated even more so to look at early articles) perhaps this tragedy could have been avoided.

Like it or not remote user online research is here to stay and it is growing rapidly. Not only does a library have enhance and revamp their library web sites for their users, but they should also try and remember and remind (when necessary) users that not everything is online.