Intellectual literacy hour

A new report says libraries will have to change what they do or risk becoming redundant. Natasha Gilbert reports

Lynne Bridley, chief executive of the British Library
Lynne Bridley, chief executive of the British Library, says the report is 'spot on'. Photograph: Linda Nylind

Research libraries have long been the proud curators of historic print collections and regarded as places of quiet study. But with the explosion of the internet and electronic publishing, users are increasingly turning their backs on libraries as a physical space, using them as virtual, digital environments instead. Libraries' role in warehousing large book collections is rapidly becoming redundant, according to a study.

The study, published tomorrow, warns that libraries must move with the digital times or risk becoming irrelevant. They must simplify access to digital and online resources to meet the needs of their users, particularly future generations of academics who have grown up in a digital world.

The study was led by Dr Ian Rowlands, a lecturer in library and information studies at University College London. It looks at how people use and search web-based information. It is the first attempt in the UK to investigate claims that the "Google generation" - people born after 1993 into a world dominated by the internet - uses electronic information sources differently from older generations. The aim of the study was to see how the generation's information-seeking behaviour might affect their expectations and use of libraries as they enter higher education or research careers.

The study profiled the users of BL learning, a British Library web-based information package aimed at schoolchildren and teachers, and a specialist online information service for academics run by the funding councils' Joint Information Systems Committee.

Unintuitive design

The older and the younger cohorts in the study exhibited erratic information browsing behaviour, visiting only a few pages and spending little time reading their contents. This behaviour could be due to the complex and unintuitive design of libraries' information systems and poor information-seeking skills, the study suggests.

Contrary to popular belief, young people's ability to search for and evaluate information on the web has not improved with the widening access to technology, the study says. Young people tend to use search engines such as Google and Yahoo as their first, and often only, port of call in searching for information. They have a poor understanding of their information needs and find it difficult to develop effective search strategies. They also spend little time evaluating information for relevance, accuracy or authority, it says.

"Children (especially) tend to make very narrow relevance judgments by considering the presence or absence of words exactly describing the search topic. As a result, they miss many relevant documents and end up repeating searches. Information seeking tends to stop at the point at which articles are found and printed, especially for younger users, with little regard to the document content ... Many young people do not find library-sponsored resources intuitive, and therefore prefer to use Google or Yahoo instead. These offer a familiar, if simplistic, solution for their study needs."

Rowlands says children born after the big bang of the web lack a mental map of the information landscape, which could be affecting their ability to search for and evaluate information.

"As a kid, I grew up spending hours in the central reference library in Plymouth. This helped me form a clear understanding of the information landscape because of the physical layout of the library, and the appearance of materials. You get a sense of how big one collection is compared to another. Dictionaries, maps and official statistics all have a specific place, feel and appearance in the library and this helped me understand the concept of these sources of information and how to use them," he says.

"But today, there is a real danger that kids are losing a mental map of the information landscape. I see it with undergraduates here at UCL. Their awareness of the premium content that libraries have licensed electronically is in many cases very limited. They naturally gravitate towards Google because it is easy and predicable. But they rarely view the search results beyond the second page and there is little evaluation of the different sorts of information it throws up. The concern is that people may not be able to distinguish a credible information source from one that is not credible."

He says a poor level of information literacy in young people could potentially be very damaging. A study undertaken in the US found a link between the level of academic achievement in university students and information literacy.

"In the UK, the university experience is now much more focused around self-directed learning and students' ability to do research under their own steam," Rowlands says. "But we are not investing in equipping students with the tools to do this effectively. If, as the US study suggests, information skills make a difference to academic outcomes, we could be stacking up problems. It raises some very big issues about how we might improve the general level of people coming into universities." Rowlands calls on the government to push information literacy up its agenda. He says intervention to improve information skills is urgently needed at school level.

Huge array of resources

Libraries also need to improve awareness of and simplify the huge array of electronic and digital resources they offer, Rowlands adds. Libraries are not keeping up with the demands of students and researchers for services that are integrated and consistent with their wider internet experience such as Google, the study says. Information consumers do not necessarily use services in the way libraries assume, and a one-size-fits-all policy towards the design of library systems will not be effective. The study recommends that libraries invest more in monitoring and evaluating the way people use their services, to ensure they stay relevant and to allow libraries to argue against static or declining budgets.

Dame Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library, says the study's recommendations to ensure libraries remain relevant and provide the right kind of services are "spot on". "This is top of the British Library's agenda, and we want to use the findings to encourage library systems to step up to that challenge," she says.

A flurry of activity is under way at the British Library to digitise collections, such as newspapers and books, and train staff in web-based skills to improve the electronic content, including webcasts, blogs and online debates. "The alternative is to not be relevant, to be bypassed, and then many of the great resources and skills we have got will not be sought out or found," Brindley says. "There is a seriously valuable role that libraries can play better than anyone else. If they do not move forward, then the future will be a lesser one."

Libraries should also play a key role in helping to teach information literacy skills, she says. "That the younger generation is technologically more literate but not more information literate is a challenge that must be tackled by libraries and education more widely. Students who simply want to use Google and take what it says as gospel do a real disservice to the skills people will increasingly need to survive the digital economy," says Brindley.

"Libraries add a degree of sophistication, support and richness of content, all of which will encourage creativity, quality research and participation of the citizen in the global digital world that we are in."

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