Closely linked to student ability to search effectively for information, is the idea that students do not know how to evaluate the quality of the information that they find, which becomes increasingly important when the Internet is factored in (Beeson, 2006). Fieldhouse and Nicholas liken the Internet to a “giant sweetshop, in which we behave like children, grabbing all we can get with less regards for quality than quantity” (2008, p.49). This may be especially true if the competency levels librarians expect of students are equal to the sanctimonious standards defined by our profession (see section 12 and appendix 11).
Palfrey and Gasser (2008), based on conversations with ‘Digital Natives’, suggest that accuracy of information is not a priority for students except for when it affects their grades, something which more experienced information users like librarians find difficult to understand. However observation and research suggests that students do evaluate information in a manner appropriate to the technology they are using (Palfrey and Gasser, 2008) or for their particular need (White and Le Cornu, 2011). For example feedback from one of our students, who uses the Internet to find information for his projects, suggests that he does understand the value of good, quality information in academic work (see appendix 2). Having searched the Internet, he then carries out a secondary search on our resource discovery tool Summon to weed out the reliable from the unreliable information, and thus uses our resources to validate what he finds on Google. If he finds the same thing on Summon, then he knows "the information is OK”, because librarians have vetted it. This is a slightly baffling use of Summon for a Librarian to
comprehend. Why not search Summon in the first instance? However, the end result is the same, and maybe this is a salutary reminder that despite the official
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‘librarianly’ way of doing things, there is always an equally effective alternative. Indeed Markless ponders whether librarians should be less critical of the way that ‘Digital Natives’ interact with information (2009).
According to CIBER’s research, the Internet, while enabling rapid research and vast search results, does not allow for careful evaluation of information (2008). Research shows however, that students engage in a process of cross-checking information online (CIBER, 2008; Palfrey and Gasser, 2008) while studies from the USA discovered that many students adopt a collaborative evaluation strategy utilising the opinions of friends, family or academics (Head and Eisenberg, 2010), a tactic that continues into the workplace (Head, 2012). Anthropological studies of student library behaviour by Boukacem-Zeghmouri (2014) and Foster (2014) demonstrate that students use social media research tools such as Research Gate and Mendeley to assess the quality of information that they have found on Google and discover further connections. This suggests that social media supports
student IL and is used to enable them to cope with their lack of understanding and awareness of knowledge within their discipline. Ability to evaluate information can also be affected by how much experience users’ have in navigating the online environment (Palfrey and Gasser, 2008).
However what students are apparently unaware of is that library resources have also developed along similar lines to social media and other resources, such as Amazon and Flickr, which commonly use recommender systems and tagging to alleviate the information overload. Many journal databases now offer alerting services, as do journal ‘tables-of-contents’ services such as Zetoc, and
bibliographic management software such as Proquest Flow enable users to share references. Thus the need for students to evaluate information in isolation is
reduced, while perhaps the emphasis has shifted to the need to make connections. There is little evidence to suggest that online information is of lower quality than more traditional printed information sources. In fact there is debate around the enrichment of online information through crowd-sourcing, which is perhaps lacking in some for-profit publications. Palfrey and Gasser (2008) use Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica as a case in point. White and Le Cornu also
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of information in some instances (2011). As such, an awareness of how information is produced, its context and value may be as important as the traditional evaluation skills espoused by librarians.
It would therefore seem apparent that reliance on the Internet has changed the relationship of younger people with information in a way that might be
disconcerting to a Librarian (Markless, 2009). However it is worth remembering that the problem of discerning good information from bad is an age-old problem (Asher, 2003) and that:
“At no time in world history has there been any lie-detection system to help sort fact from fiction.” (Palfrey and Gasser, 2008, p.157)
The selection, interpretation and ethical use of information by students and society as a whole remains a major issue which our profession needs to address. As we will discuss in later sections, one of our responses to this was the development of activities as part of our ‘public work’. These variously encourage students to assess a range of items on the same subject from different sources, to consider evaluation criteria and its appropriate use and to develop an awareness of how information is produced and the impact of this on currency and authority (Edwards and Hill, 2013a, see appendix 3).