Survey Finds Students Often Use Library Resources, But Not Services

A new report released this month from Project Information Literacy at the University of Washington (UW), "Truth Be Told: How College Students Evaluate and Use Information in the Digital Age," [PDF] finds that many higher-ed students struggle with sorting through the vast amounts of information available when doing research, but they tend not to ask librarians for assistance. Indeed, to keep the research process as simple as possible, many appear to fall back on predictable routines that may not produce the best results.

Library materials, not library services
The survey's results are based on a sample of more than 8,300 sophomores, juniors, and seniors at 25 higher ed institutions surveyed in the spring of 2010. They revealed that while students may use library resources, they often don't make use of library services.

The two sources used most often for course-related research were course readings (96%) and search engines such as Google (92%). Although 88% reported using scholarly research databases, far fewer used physical library materials (53%), or interlibrary loan (23%). Only 30% listed librarians as a source, down from 47% in a similar survey last year [PDF].

Evaluating content
When asked how they evaluate research content, only 11% of respondents said they asked academic librarians for assistance, while 49% asked their instructors, and 32% asked classmates. Most students did attempt to assess the quality of web content on a basic level on their own—for example, 77% said that they would make sure that website content was up-to-date, and 73% would assess author credentials.

The sheer volume of information, however, appears to be overwhelming for many students: 61% reported that filtering through irrelevant results was a difficult step in the research process, and 42% listed finding articles in library databases as difficult. To minimize the time and effort spent on research, some students fell back on arbitrary methods of limiting information—26% said they would end a search once a required number of citations was found, for example, and 28% said they'd used the same journal articles or books for multiple research assignments.

The report's authors, Alison Head and Michael Eisenberg, recommended that academic librarians emphasize teaching research strategies to students, rather than simply helping to find sources for a particular assignment.

Similar conclusions
The survey is similar in some ways to a project from earlier this year, the Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries (ERIAL) Project, funded by the Illinois State Library, in which a small sample of students, faculty, and librarians at five Illinois academic institutions were interviewed about student research methods.

One of the researchers for that project, Andrew Asher, spoke at the ITHAKA Sustainable Scholarship Conference in September (as LJ reported) and pointed out that students were more likely to use Google than more in-depth databases. He also indicated that educators tend to spend more time teaching how to use particular search tools than they do teaching research strategies.

(Click here for LJ Academic Newswire columnist Barbara Fister's recent take on the UW report.)