My generation

Some more news from the British Library this week, as they co-launched with JISC a report on “Information behaviour of the researcher of the future”. The spiel on the day was about revealing who the Google Generation actually were. This followed some much needed myth-busting on how research and search is conducted online and by whom.

Underpinning all this is the issue of information literacy or often lack of it, among searchers today.

The fundamental myth the report addressed was that the ‘Google Generation’; those born and raised in an internet world possess the best web-literacy. In fact what the report has found is that although younger generations are at ease with computers and the web, there is a heavy reliance on search engines and a tendency to avoid reading and analysing online. The preference is to view and view quickly before rapidly moving on.

The Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER) from UCL who conducted the study explained that a main characteristic of the digital age is horizontal information seeking. This entails a form of ‘skimming’ information before ‘bouncing’ somewhere else. Something I would guess will ring true even for the most information literate of you.

What is also interesting is that this behaviour of the ‘Google Generation’ isn’t limited to those born from the early 1990’s onwards (although they may be faster adopters of such behaviour). It seems all age groups share these traits, and that doesn’t bode well for information literacy skills.

Of course the BL’s involvement in this is to address how libraries should modify themselves to these changing digital needs and behaviours of their users. They cited their example of embarking on massive digitisation projects as a means of opening up more of their content to more of the population. But, more than anything, they wanted to “send a strong message to the government and society at large” about those lacking in decent information skills.

There are a lot more insightful gems contained in the report here, certainly worth a good old fashioned read-through.