Attitudes and Behaviors in the Field of Economics: Anomaly or Leading Indicator

This paper will explore the challenges and opportunities that libraries face in the digital world from the perspective of a single disciplinary field: economics. Through analysis of faculty surveys, interviews with economists, and assessment of the impact of new digital resources and services that have emerged to support the field, we will highlight how the behaviors and attitudes of this field have changed in a very short period of time. What kind of services do the economists need from libraries, and perhaps more importantly, from librarians? Are the changes in behavior of economists over the last decade, which have been characterized by a dramatic reduction in their dependence on the traditional library, anomalous and specific to the field, or are they predictive of broader trends? What might this mean for the choices that librarians must make in order to support scholarship?