These are today's K-12 and university students. Accustomed to finding information about anything, anytime on the Internet, they have access to the world that previous generations could not even begin to fathom. And although this connectivity to content can have a powerful intellectual impact, it can also present a challenge when students enter the hallowed halls of higher education.

"Faculty are becoming increasingly concerned about the inability of their students to conduct academic research," says Dawn Talbot, a librarian in UC San Diego's Digital Library Program.

That is, today's students consider themselves skilled in information seeking, and in fact, they are quite proficient at finding news, maps, movie theaters, music, and other types of information through Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Yet they have great difficulty in locating scholarly work, or information appropriate for inclusion in their academic assignments. The majority of students don't recognize that there is a difference between searching for popular information and conducting academic research. In essence, students don't know what they don't know.

Information Literacy A Hot Topic

With a dizzying array of information available through the Internet, much of which is not vetted by knowledgeable sources, students have to be careful to avoid using unreliable data. And, like many of us, they are not alone in the habit of looking at only the first screen of results that an Internet search engine spits out, thus relying on a fraction of data available on a topic. This "laziness" might be fine if you're looking for recipes, but if you're conducting academic research, it can have disastrous consequences.

A case in point: In 2001, a 24-year-old volunteer in an asthma study at Johns Hopkins University suffered a reaction to a chemical (hexamethonium) used in the clinical trial and died. Before conducting the study, the researcher had conducted Internet and medical database searches for information about possible dangers of the drug. However, he didn't know that one of those databases, the National Library of Medicine's PubMed, which is a well-respected resource, only contains data back to 1966 and thus did not include the scholarly articles published in the 1950s that made reference to the dangers of the drug. The researcher probably would have found these articles -- and the young woman would not have died -- if he had known the limitations of his searching strategies.

"Students need information skills not just to get through school but also when immersed in their careers and in day-to-day living," says UCSD's Talbot. "I see incoming graduate students whose academic research skills are abysmal. And throughout their lives students will continue to be bombarded by information from a variety of sources so they need to learn information discovery and assessment skills as part of their formal education."

- Patricia Iannuzzi,  UC Berkeley

In addition, with ubiquitous access to information in digital form, it's easier than ever for students to "cut and paste" content from the Internet and "re-purpose" it in their own work, often without understanding the ethical consequences. (In this regard, digital technology is a boon for faculty as well, as they can more easily deter or discover incidences of plagiarism with tools like turnitin.com .)

In effect, today's students need to modify some habits they've acquired via years of web surfing to become educated about how to search for and use scholarly information. These skills are often referred to as "information literacy" or "information competency" -- catchphrases used since the 1970s, primarily by librarians and information scientists, to describe the set of abilities needed to know when information is needed and how to find, evaluate, and use it appropriately and ethically.

"Students frequently do not possess the skills necessary to navigate or utilize this constantly changing information-rich environment," says Patty Iannuzzi, an associate university librarian at UC Berkeley and author of Teaching Information Literacy Skills (Allyn and Bacon, 1999). "The wealth of digital information resources does not create a better-informed student unless that individual has a complementary set of critical thinking and technological abilities to locate, evaluate, and effectively use this information."

In 2000, Iannuzzi chaired a national multi-association committee that developed the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, which have been endorsed by the American Association of Higher Education (AAHE) and the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL). The standards are widely used throughout the country, have been adapted for use in several countries, and have been translated into several languages. (See list of standards .) But even before these standards were articulated, many librarians were leading a grassroots effort to make information literacy an important part of the University of California's educational mission.

Librarians will tell you that producing information-literate students (and thus, civilians) has been a priority since the days of Thomas Jefferson, who sold his personal library to the government to help found the Library of Congress. What is new about information literacy and why it's generating a lot of attention these days is the burgeoning of electronic resources and the ease with which students can find an overwhelming number of materials -- without ever stepping foot into a library. No longer do students feel the need to learn about library catalogs or the Library of Congress classification system -- they expect to find everything through a search engine on their computer.

"In the old days, students knew they had to come physically to the library to get help. Now they can circumvent the library and search on their computers at home," says Iannuzzi. "Studies show that students increasingly rely upon the Internet as their first and favored tool for finding information in support of research assignments, but they are not aware that they are only accessing a minuscule number of scholarly publications."

Because most scholarly journals and specialized academic databases require paid subscriptions, they are not accessible through the "open" web, which means students who conduct research through Google or Yahoo will not find them; however, students will find an abundance of scholarly information if they know to search through the California Digital Library (CDL) as well as the library web portals set up by UC campuses, which provide access to thousands of journals and other scholarly publications (and, not unimportantly, for which the University spends millions of dollars).

Students Lack Basic Skills

The UCLA library conducted a survey in 1999 to assess information competence in its undergraduates and found that, in general, students lacked basic skills. UC Berkeley conducted similar surveys in 1994, 1995, and 1999 and also found their students had poor skills as well as the tendency to rate their information literacy abilities far higher than their actual competency level.

"I think the most important finding was that there was a low level of competence at using information -- the students didn't demonstrate that they grasped pretty basic elements," says Eleanor Mitchell, UCLA College librarian. "Among the results that were shocking in our survey was that many students did not provide citations for materials when they took as much as an entire paragraph verbatim from a source. They don't know how to footnote, or when or why to footnote."

On the positive side, the UCLA survey found that the greater the number of library experiences a student had (defined as any activity using library resources), the higher the student's level of information competency, says Mitchell.

Connecting to Inquiry-based Learning

As libraries become less a physical place and more an integrated campuswide service that has both physical and virtual interfaces, faculty, administrators, and librarians are challenged with devising new approaches to connect students to their resources as well as help them make sense of the multitude of information resources at their disposal.

Simultaneous to the explosion in electronic information resources in the late 1990s was a movement in higher education toward student-centered learning environments and away from traditional lecture formats. (Or put in clever yet simplistic terms, proponents say teachers should become a "guide on the side" rather than a "sage on the stage.") This emphasis on "inquiry-based" or "active" learning in today's research universities began reaching the point of critical mass in 1998 with the publication of the Boyer Commission Report, Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America's Research Universities. The commission advocated that students become "independent, self-directed learners" -- something that demands that they also become information literate.

"This is about undergraduate education, not about information, or technology, or libraries," says UC Berkeley's Iannuzzi. "The skills of an information literate person resonate with everyone in the academy. It's the way we teach and learn. Information literacy does not belong with the librarians. It's a shared responsibility and the largest share belongs with the faculty in their teaching."

Finding the time and opportunity in which to integrate information literacy education into the undergraduate curriculum is a challenge common to many research universities. "Librarians need to work more closely with faculty to teach these critical skills but there is a tension because faculty have a lot to accomplish in a given quarter," says UCSD's Talbot.

Cathy Palmer,  UC Irvine

Librarians are making significant inroads by approaching this effort in ways appropriate to their specific institutions. Many are strategically targeting courses that enroll a lot of first-year students and for which inquiry-based learning is a natural fit, such as Humanities or Composition courses.

For example, for over 15 years Cathy Palmer, head of Education and Outreach for the libraries at UC Irvine, has been working with instructors of freshman Composition courses to integrate these skills. This program has been successful in affecting the educational experience of the majority of the undergraduate population.

"There's been a curriculum-integrated library component since 1986 in the Writing 39C course and since the early 1990s in the Humanities core courses. All freshman take one or the other," says Palmer. "The way we provide instruction to students has evolved over time from a 'talking head' one-shot lecture to a more hands-on approach using computers in a workshop setting where students can actually do research on a topic while they are receiving the instruction."

Palmer is also part of a team at UCI that has developed Shared Pedagogical Initiatives, a Database for Electronic Resources (SPIDER), a repository of Web-based instructional materials that makes use of the sophisticated research resources available through the CDL to teach undergraduates about the creation of new knowledge. (Read related TLtC article from December 2001.) They plan to build on what they've done at UCI and make it available to other campuses.

"UC Irvine is very fortunate in that we have faculty who are strong library supporters and are willing to give up course time for this level of instruction," says Palmer. "And I think we hit it at the right time, and our campus was the right size and the right place to lay a foundation and build on it. And because it was successful it has grown and we have been able to scale it."

Integration and Collaboration Are Key

But the stars are not in perfect alignment on all UC campuses. That's why the statewide Librarians' Association of the University of California (LAUC) has just recently announced the creation of a task force to investigate establishing UC-wide information literacy standards, similar to those established by California State University several years ago, and based partly on the information literacy competency standards developed by the ACRL and AAHE.

"At UC, the goal, I would hope, would be to work with faculty in establishing these standards, and in developing means of encouraging collaboration among faculty and librarians to help test for, implement, and assess achievement of the standards," says Esther Grassian, instructional services coordinator in the UCLA College Library, president-elect of LAUC, and co-author of a textbook on teaching information literacy (Grassian & Kaplowitz, Information Literacy Instruction: Theory and Practice, Neal-Schuman, 2001).

Based on the findings from the 1999 survey, the UCLA library has begun an initiative to integrate information literacy in a strategic and sequenced fashion throughout the undergraduate curriculum. The 13 libraries at UCLA are decentralized, making a coherent strategy difficult to achieve; however, they have already had some success in the Writing programs, General Education cluster courses, and with individual faculty members, and are hoping to build on those successes.

"Among the things we're working on is to implement several one-credit adjunct courses, taught by a UCLA librarian serving as an adjunct faculty member, that would be like labs adjacent to a course and would dovetail with the goals of the course," says College Librarian Mitchell. "Librarians would teach information skills tethered very closely to what the faculty want the students to get out of the course. I think this will be an effective method because it will give us a closer-to-the-bone way of teaching -- it won't be an add-on or one standalone class -- and it will be something for credit."