The USA's Project Information Literacy has published its latest research report Lessons Learned: How College Students Find Information in the Digital Age, which describes results from a survey of 2,318 students carried out last Spring at six U.S. universities. There were also some follow-up interviews.From a superficial skim I would say that in general the findings tally with those that have emerged from UK studies of student use of resources, e.g. the findings of the excellent JUSTEIS studies (see e.g. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june03/urquhart/06urquhart.html or http://www.dil.aber.ac.uk/dils/Research/Justeis/JISCTop.htm ) and the report on the information behaviour of the researcher of the future (http://www.publishing.ucl.ac.uk/behaviour.html ) e.g. a reasonably narrow range of resources often used, use of search engines, lack of use of librarians, the importance of the lecturer in guiding behaviour, continued use of "traditional resources". I will certainly have a longer look, especially as it teases out some of these issues in more depth. Project homepage at http://projectinfolit.org/ and project report:
Head, A. and Eisenberg, M. (2009) Lessons Learned: How College Students Find Information in the Digital Age. Seatttle: University of Washington. http://projectinfolit.org/pdfs/PIL_Fall2009_Year1Report_12_2009.pdf
Photo by Sheila Webber: Library, Gregynog Hall, December 2009: I was there on Monday and Tuesday for a meeting about developing an Information Literacy Strategy for Wales: I will blog about that tomorrow!
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A couple of other related reports - "Researchers of Tomorrow" (reviewed at Do Libraries Cater for Today's Researchers and Research Students? and a Cambridge University Library/Arcadia research project on "Information Skills Provision for Cambridge Undergraduates" reviewed at Do Libraries Cater for Today's Undergraduate Students?).
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