The Free Range Librarian blog has a really interesting post about a University of Washington report on students' info-seeking behaviours. There are some provisos of course: the research was sponsored by ProQuest, the study only looked at 2318 students on 6 US campuses, and the report was prepared by an info lit advocacy group (Project Information Literacy). In my opinion, there is a prejudice against reference service per se that I've observed in other info lit material.
All that said, it's still worth reading the blog post, let alone the report itself. Schneider writes that "when they need help, they don’t turn to the library; often, they turn to faculty. Librarians ranked only above “blogs” among a list of 15 possible information sources used for coursework." She then asks asks some potent questions like "why don’t we adapt our practices so that we are working with the “proxies” for library services — the faculty themselves, who create the assignments, interact first and most with students, and are the referrals for the tools we offer?"
The report findings "suggest that students conceptualize research, especially tasks associated with seeking information, as a competency learned by rote, rather than as an opportunity to learn, develop, or expand upon an information-gathering strategy." If that's true, how and when should we be taking part in the process?
http://freerangelibrarian.com/2009/12/01/must-read-project-information-literacy-report/
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3 comments:
Hi, just happened to see this about Project Information Literacy (PIL) and thought I should clarify a few of your assumptions, as the Co-Director and Co-PI of PIL, in the hopes they do not mislead people about what PIL does or is.
1. Yes, ProQuest sponsored the research with a gift to the University of Washington's iSchool to further the study of information literacy. ProQuest, however, was not involved in the research questions we asked, the study design, or analysis and interpretations of the data. We are scholarly researchers, based in a research university, and not a public relations firm that was hired to promote ProQuest or anything or anyone else, for that matter.
2. Yes, the findings are based on 2,318 respondents to the PIL survey from 6 U.S. campuses. No, the findings are not generalizable to a larger population of all students in the U.S. Yes, we we openly acknowledge in the introduction and conclusion. However, what we do say, is given this study, this sample, there were fairly robust relationship between variables from six very different institutions that participated in the study.
3. No, we are not an information literacy advocacy group. See 1.
Many thanks for posting this clarification,
- Alison Head, Ph.D.
As one of the authors of the report, just a comment about the funding/support - yes, we did receive some support from ProQuest (as well as the MacArthur Foundation). However, there was no interaction at all with ProQuest folks in terms of research design, data collection, analysis of results, or writeup.
So, while we readily acknowledge generalizability limitations (and say so in the report), we stand by the work as independent and unbiased.
Mike Eisenberg
University of Washington
"In my opinion, there is a prejudice against reference service per se that I've observed in other info lit material."
This is a very revealing comment that throws lights on some of the other comments in your post. This is work by two esteemed, highly-regarded LIS scholars, not some random NGO activity. Yes it is funded by a company but one that has "skin in the game" to ENCOURAGE use of library resources.
Nobody's against "reference." The point is to understand how students seek information and then rethink services accordingly. As the comments on my blog post ably demonstrate, there is a growing body of data that demonstrate where things are broken, and it is our job--not the work of the researchers--to think our way through this.
You're first and foremost a librarian, not a "reference" librarian, and that means you have an obligation to help solve the problem, not dismiss it.
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