This briefing paper from the JISC (the UK's Joint Information Steering Committee) is a brief yet excellent summary of the current state of information seeking and information retrieval in academic libraries.

Here are a couple things that stood out to me in the paper:

"Power browsing is when a student or researcher selects just a few pages from an e-book or an e-journal to pick out the relevant information. Information seekers (undergraduate and graduate students as well as professors) prefer speedy access to a section of information and tend to spend very little time using content."

"High-quality metadata is becoming more important for discovery of appropriate resources."

--Jeffrey Beall