What students want: ease, speed, and librarians

Why do students always start a search with Google?

“Efficiency and accessibility—the simplicity,” explained a college student. “The library website is hard to use. You shouldn’t have to teach us how to use the site. It should be obvious.”

In the past year, I’ve had a chance to hear many high school and college students talk about how they use the library, including a panel from Illinois’s University Laboratory High School at the 2010 SLJ Leadership Summit and a group from Canada’s McMaster University at Library Journal’s symposium “The Future of the Academic Library.”

Some of McMaster’s students, I was happy to hear, actually consulted the library’s website before they went to Google—but they admitted it took them two or three years to learn to do so.

Add to this the exhaustive report “How College Students Evaluate and Use Information in the Digital Age” from the University of Washington iSchool’s Project Information Literacy and some clear trends—at least to my mind—emerge. While the study focuses on higher ed, it offers some useful findings to any librarian who works with young people ages 12 and up.

For those who worry about kids who go straight to Google, here’s the good news. The report says that college students take little at face value and frequently evaluate websites used for course work; .edu and .gov have meaning for them. Kudos to the librarians they encountered before they began college?

But when undergrads do use library resources, such as a database, the comfort factor comes into play. McMaster’s students said they used a product again and again—even if it wasn’t the best resource for their specific topic. As the study explains: “…students use an information-seeking and research strategy driven by efficiency and predictability.”

Without the opportunity to encounter a healthy number of online resources in high school—through a school librarian, most likely supported by statewide licenses—I’d bet it takes college kids several years to become successful online searchers, no doubt diminishing their potential to succeed in the meantime.

As expected, most high school and college students had a smartphone. But none of the college students used them to access library resources—in fact, the idea seemed remote—despite the fact that McMaster’s library offers many mobile resources that are easily and clearly accessible. I hope students will take advantage of these tools as K–12 schools begin to close the gap between handheld devices and formal learning.

While today’s librarians can’t seem to stop talking about ebooks, high school and college students react to them with a big shrug. None of the students on either panel owned an ereader—and only a high school science-fiction fan seemed at all enthusiastic about what ebooks could offer. Instead, students often extol the value of a physical book: they can mark it up. Of course, these students came of age when most ebook reading was an elite and expensive activity without the learning supports students might wish for.

A key finding in the report is that 84 percent of students say that the most difficult step in course-related research is getting started: defining a topic, narrowing it down, filtering the results. Clearly this is a big opportunity for librarians.

But how can librarians develop interventions that will help students do research? From McMaster, the answer was: subtly. “The best way to get information across is to pretend you’re not trying to get information across,” said one student. “Making feedback and conversation convenient for students is helpful.” Rather than having to attend workshops, students want to be engaged when they need assistance.

“What we want,” said one young woman, “is more of a librarian presence at the library.”

Brian Kenney
Editor-in-Chief
bkenney@mediasourceinc.com