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As librarians on a college campus, we often feel isolated from the lives of undergraduate students. They are our most numerous and visible patrons, but they have lifestyles and concerns very unlike ours. There is growing evidence that they study in different ways than we do and approach research in a different fashion. By their own account, they stay up much later than we do, fit many more activities into a day, and stay in constant touch with each other via cell phones, instant messaging, and other electronic tools. By the time they are ready to do research and writing, the librarians have gone home. Google, of course, never sleeps. This is a professional problem, as well as the source of some social awkwardness. When combined with fewer reference interviews, declining circulation statistics, but a rising gate count, it suggests that we are becoming obsolete. As a building and a meeting place, the library is more popular than ever; as a provider of reference services, however, it is largely ignored. How should we deal with this? At the River Campus Libraries we concluded that it would help if we understood our undergraduate students better. Many of us extrapolate from our own college careers to get some idea of the pressures (and the freedoms) undergraduates experience today. But a more current perspective is needed here, for technology and changing social norms are transforming college life. Through the Undergraduate Research Project we studied the behavior of undergraduates in several ways. After many months of coviewing and sifting the accumulated data, we arrived at a crucial point. We needed to turn our findings into a few specific …