OCLC recently published a report with the admittedly less-than-thrilling title "College Students' Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources" which examines the information-seeking habits and preferences of 400 international college students. They surveyed college students from Australia, Canada, India, Singapore, United Kingdom and the United States about what they think about libraries and search engines. The results are somewhat suprising, in that the library turns out to not be as irrelevant to students' intellectual lives as much of the NetGen literature suggests. The authors of the report do suggest, however, that the library has a marketing problem, in that its 'brand' is the book. They write: 

OCLC's Lorcan Dempsey, by way of his blog, provides us with a  useful set of ruminations about how to think about the future of the library catalog, and a framework for asking that question in a broader context. Along the way, he also places a number of other library services (Interlibrary Loan, Federated Search) into that framework, providing useful ways to think about all of the evolutions implicated in the suprisingly rapid transition to a more fully networked information system.  On the catalog, he writes: