About

Project Information Literacy (PIL) is ongoing research project, based in the University of Washington's Information School. We are currently collecting data from early adults enrolled in community colleges and public and private colleges and universities in the U.S.

Our goal is to understand how early adults conceptualize and operationalize research activities for course work and "everyday life" use and especially how they resolve issues of credibility, authority, relevance, and currency in the digital age.

Questions Frequently Asked

At what stage is the project now?

This fall, PIL will conduct a large-scale content analysis of instructors' research assignment handouts (and postings) to investigate the guidance instructors' provide to students (n= 400 - 500 handouts). During spring 2010, we will administer a large-scale student survey to students on U.S. campuses (administered on 40+ campuses, n=60,000 students).

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There is a lot of research already about information literacy, how is this study different?

Unlike the majority of information literacy research studies, PIL is a study "across" different types of campuses (community colleges, state colleges, and public and private universities) from different geographic areas in the U.S.

[Photo of an Apple]Once Year Two concludes, we hope to make some of our data sets "open source," so interested parties to freely access and use in their own work.

And lastly, our goal is to help fill in some of the "missing pieces" of the information literacy puzzle and provide data that helps answer some of the following questions:

  1. How do early adults (in their own words) put their information literacy competencies into practice in learning environments in a digital age, regardless of how they may measure up to standards for being information literate?
  2. With the proliferation of online resources and new technologies, how do early adults recognize the information needs they may have and in turn, how do they locate, evaluate, select and use the information that is needed?
  3. How can teaching the critical and information literacy skills that are needed to enable lifelong learning be more effectively transferred to college students?

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What practical impact is PIL meant to have?

So far, our research study has had considerable impact and added to understanding of information literacy issues in five key areas:

  1. How information literacy training and coaching is provided to early adults by professors and librarians for conducting course-related research and for "everyday life" research (e.g., health and wellness, finance and commerce, news, and politics or policy).
  2. How college curriculum that requires course-related research and everyday life research is developed and communicated to early adults.
  3. How the design of online resources used by campus libraries and produced by database vendors, enhance or detract from early adults' research experiences.
  4. How (and by how much) different types of institutions impact the information-seeking strategies of their early adults.
  5. How we, as a society, may understand the information problem-solving potential of current U.S. college students who are an important subset of the "adult" cohort, given their unprecedented abundance in enrollment numbers, their professional destinies, and their likelihood to have "grown up digitally".

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How do we collect our data?

During Year Two (2009-2010) we will collect data using a content analysis of professors' research handouts (n = 400- 500 handouts ) and a large-scale student survey across multiple campuses that includes a volunteer sample and a randomly selected sample (n=60,000).

Overall, we use social science research methods and employ an information-seeking behavior in our research.

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Who is on PIL's Advisory Board?

PIL's Advisory Board counts on the expertise of its members who have generously given their time, support, and ideas:

  • Susan Gilroy, Head of Reference Services at Lamont Library, Harvard University.
  • Peter Morville, a highly regarded user experience consultant, librarian, and widely as the "Father of Information Architecture."
  • Dr. David Nasatir, a Visiting Professor in U.C. Berkeley's Sociology Department, an experienced statistician, and a senior researcher on the PIL study.
  • Karen Schneider, the Library Director of Cushing Library at Holy Names University, who writes of the impact of technology on the library field in her blog, Free Range Librarian.

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What is the history of PIL?

In 2007, a small team of faculty and librarians conducted a unique, exploratory research project at Saint Mary's College of California (SMC), led by PIL's Alison Head.

We studied information literacy through the lens of the students' experience to find out how students conceptualized and operationalized the course-related research process.

The initial "exploratory" study results held some surprises:

  1. We found the majority of students (87%) did not  go to Google's search engine first when conducting research as many previous studies have suggested. Students did use the campus library, library web sites, and librarians, and in fact, relied heavily upon these library sources.
  2. Overall, students struggled with figuring out what scholarly research actually meant and required them to do. The first step in the research process was often the most difficult one for students.
  3. Project Information Literacy has grown into a research project with a national focus. In our larger study, we are interested in finding out whether the trends we discovered in our original SMC research project are generalizable and if so, in what ways, and if not, how is the larger sample different?

From this early work, PIL was founded in 2008 at the University of Washington's iSchool. Alison Head and Dean Emeritus and Professor Michael Eisenberg, based on a mutual passion for information literacy research, became PIL's Co-Directors and Co-Principal Investigators.

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Want to find out more?

If you want to read more, see the PIL Progress Report with findings from our fall 2008 discussion groups.

Tune into one of our public service short videos on the PIL Channel about being a student in the digital age, conducting research, and frustrations, procrastination, and use of Wikipedia.

Or, you can also listen to a First Monday podcast about the original study and plans for Project Information Literacy (February 2008).

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