"Rebekah Nathan" isn't the only anthropologist who is studying students.
The article in Democrat & Chronicle starts like this (quite typically for journalists who are somehow puzzeled by recent changes in anthropology)
On and off for two years, anthropologist Nancy Foster lived with and observed the Wapishana, an indigenous tribe in Guyana and northern Brazil whose members live as hunters, farmers and fishermen. Now she's studying a group nearly as exotic — college students.
And it goes on:
Employing the same methods numerous companies use to study their workers, University of Rochester's River Campus library system is dissecting how its students live and work. The goal is to figure out ways of making the library more accessible to them for research papers and other projects.
The work comes on the heels of a similar study led by Foster of UR faculty to see how they used the library, particularly its online offerings. The result was that UR faculty now have personalized pages on the library's UR Research Web site — it being a repository of various studies and papers done by faculty.
>> read more in the Democrat & Chronicle (updated link)
PS: We read about the possible consequences of this research. Students might be able to send an instant message to a reference librarian with questions. Something similar is already possible at the public library in Oslo. You can send sms and chat with librarians, see here
www.biblioteksvar.no/en/
This entry was posted by admin and filed under technology, design anthropology, applied anthropology, fieldwork / methods, University / Academia. 
Thanks for mentioning the ethnographic work that University of Rochester Libraries has been doing in connection with the development of digital library tools and systems. I hope that anyone interested in this work, or working in a similar vein, will please get in touch. Also, our new project is described at: www.extensiblecatalog.info.