Welcome

Project Information Literacy is a national study about early adults and their information-seeking behaviors, competencies, and the challenges they face when conducting research in the digital age.

Based in University of Washington's iSchool, the large-scale research project investigates how early adults on different college campuses conduct research for course work and how they conduct "everyday research" for use in their daily lives... more >

Read PIL's Latest Report >

Winding Path

Just released is PIL's "Assigning Inquiry: How Handouts for Research Assignments Guide Today's College Students" with findings from a content analysis of 191 handouts from 28 different U.S. campuses. Watch the preview video (2:22), read the full report (41 pages, PDF, 2.14MB). For news coverage, read stories in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Education-Portal, and Inside Higher Ed.

Smart Talks >

Smart Talks

In our latest "Smart Talks" interview, we got a chance to talk with John Palfrey, the Co-Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and a Professor at Harvard Law School. John discusses the thorny issue of plagiarism and says, "We do need to help students understand the line between *riffing off* and *ripping off* the work of others. We riff off of one another all the time in academic work; we must all avoid ripping one another off." more>

Wikipedia Study >

PIL Wikipedia article

How do college students use Wikipedia and why? Which majors are more likely to use Wikipedia than others? Read PIL's newest research paper about Wikipedia usage, students, and course-related research, published in the March issue of First Monday. And for more about the study, read the Chronicle of Higher Education's article.

Tune in: PIL's Video Series >

Tune in: PIL's Video Series

Tune into PIL's Information Literacy Dialogs (ILD), a series of short videos about finding context for research tasks, the strategies students use for finding information, their frustrations with research, their use of Wikipedia, and procrastination. You can also subscribe to the PIL ILD channel for our future releases. (See the PIL video page for compressed WMV formats; no permission needed for re-use.)

Who's in the Sample, so far? >

[Map of United States with pushpins]

See which community colleges, public colleges and universities, and private colleges and universities in the U.S. have already joined the volunteer sample.