"Data from the Association of Research Libraries shows that reference queries at university libraries have greatly decreased during and since the late 1990s."
"The convenience of the Internet is likely tempting students to rely very heavily on it when searching for academic resources."
"An overwhelming number of college students reported that the Internet, rather than the library, is the primary site of their information searches."
The quotes above are taken from the Pew Internet Project report "The
Internet Goes to College: How Students are Living in the Future with
Today's Technology"
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_College_Report.pdf
Students are becoming more independent in their research habits, relying less on librarians for assistance and instead using sources that are familiar to them such as search engines on the Internet. Colleges should offer a class to freshmen students explaining how to properly search for reliable information. And if this does not take place, then librarians should offer workshops on the same subject.
I have taken IRLS 524 INFORMATION RESOURCES EVALUATION and supposedly know how to locate reliable information better than the average college freshman, but when I have gone and looked for topics I am interested in the field of library science in the Library Literature and LISA (Library & Information Science Abstracts) on-line databases I often cannot find what I am looking for. Some databases are just fine, for example I have no problem finding information on topics in computer science – the ACM Digital Library and the IEEE databases are quite good, but this is the exception for me rather than the rule.
Databases need to have a much larger percentage of articles on-line and in full text. Yet when I go looking for scholarly articles on Google I can often find them when I could not find them in the electronic databases. You do have to have some knowledge to know the quality of the material you are looking at, but good quality articles are able to be found via search engines. And electronic databases should be easier for students to use.
I found an interesting subject on this subject via Google: “OCLC
White Paper on the Information Habits of College Students -- June 2002
-- How Academic Librarians Can Influence Students’ Web-Based
Information Choices”. “The study concentrates on the web-based
information habits of college students and their use of campus library
websites, in particular, finding that college and university students
look to campus libraries and library websites for their information
needs. As confident and savvy users of electronic information
resources, college students value access to accurate, up-to-date
information with easily identifiable authors. They are aware of the
shortcomings of information available from the web and of their needs
for assistance in finding information in electronic or paper formats.”
http://www.mnstate.edu/schwartz/informationhabits.pdf
I recommend the above article because it talks about how students feel about sources of information they use -- most important to them is the reliablity of the information. It talks about the perceived barriers that students face (an interesting example is shortage of knowledgeable librariians). It goes into more depth on this subject than the Pew article was able to do.
Of course not everything that you find on the internet is of high quality. But I think that a class or workshop on the subject of research would be very helpful to all college students.