Alison Head – Project Information Literacy

Executive Director and Editor, PIL Provocation Series

Alison Head, Ph.D., is an information scientist and social science researcher. She is the founder and director of Project Information Literacy (PIL) and editor of the PIL Provocation Series, a national research institute that studies and publishes open access research and essays on what it is like to be a student in the digital age. In a series of 12 groundbreaking research studies, PIL has investigated how college students and recent graduates utilize research skills, competencies, and strategies for completing course work and for solving information problems in everyday life and engaging with news.

Since 2009, a multi-institutional sample of 21,000 students have participated in PIL mixed method studies. The institutional sample for PIL studies has consisted of 93 U.S. public and private colleges and universities, community colleges. In a 2016 Inside Higher Education column, Barbara Fister called PIL “hands-down the most important long-term, multi-institutional research project ever launched on how students use information for school and beyond.”

Alison has a Ph.D. in library and information science from the University of California at Berkeley where she also received her BA. Since 2017, she has been a Senior Researcher at the metaLAB at Harvard University. She was awarded the inaugural S. T. Lecturership in Library Leadership and Innovation from Harvard Library in 2017, and from 2011 through 2015, Alison was a Fellow and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Her research about today’s students and their information practices began with a small study at Saint Mary’s College of California, where she taught new media as the Roy O. Disney Visiting Professor in New Media for 10 years.

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