Scholarly work and the shaping of digital access

works within the stores of recorded knowledge. In the digital environment scholars are seeking and using information in new ways and generating new types of scholarly products, many of which are specialized resources for access to research information. These practices have important implications for the collection and organization of digital access resources. Drawing on a series of qualitative studies investigating the information work of scientists and humanities scholars, specific information seeking activities influenced by the Internet and two general modes of information access evident in research practice are identified in this article. These conceptual modes of access are examined in relation to the digital access resources currently being developed by researchers in the humanities and neuroscience. Schol-ars' modes of access and their " working " and " implicit " assemblages of information represent what researchers actually do when gathering and working with research materials and therefore provide a useful framework for the collection and organization of access resources in research libraries. Introduction The dialogue among researchers and professionals concerned with the future of scholarly communication is often focused on shifts in how research articles are being published and disseminated. Undoubtedly, electronic publishing on the Internet is quickly changing the format and means of distribution of scholarly works, but there are other dimensions of the scholarly communication cycle that are also changing in important ways. If we conceive of scholarly communication as the entire set of activities involved in scholarly exchange, the resources that assist researchers in identifying and finding publications and other sources of information are clearly of great consequence. The access resources used by scholars— the indexes, directories, bibliographies, and databases, also known as reference or tertiary sources—are of particular interest because they can mediate paths of research by encouraging certain directions and introducing barriers to others. Thus, the shift to digital production of access resources may prove to be more profound than the advent of electronic journal and book publishing. After all, access resources provide the infrastructure that makes primary and secondary publications searchable or able to be gathered as raw materials for research in the first place. Scholars generally gather large amounts of data and literature before they produce new findings or write a report on their research, and the Internet is influencing what information comes into play during this process of scholarly production. At the same time it is fostering the development of new resources for …