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Must-read report from Project Information Literacy

I’m tooling around California, having a blissfully good time, but just saw that Project Information Literacy out of U Washington had just announced it had issued a  mid-project report, based on its 2008 fall student discussion groups held on seven U.S. campuses with 86 college students.

This report is really required reading not just for librarians but for anyone designing systems and tools for librarians.

The only criticism I have of the report is that it is a little too modest in stating “you may find some things that you already know.” Librarianship is larded with anecdotal evidence, but slim on actual good data about student behavior — such as the “presearch” behavior I mentioned a couple months back — and the little data that there is is badly in need of corroboration, particularly in a profession with such a mulish resistance to evidence.

But wait, there’s more! “This spring, our research will continue with a large-scale student survey administered on three U.S. campuses.”

Big warm hug to Proquest for sponsoring this research!

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This was written by K.G. Schneider. Posted on Monday, February 9, 2009, at 10:23 pm. Filed under Librarianship. Tagged , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.