About PIL

Project Information Literacy (PIL) was a nonprofit research institute based in the San Francisco Bay Area that published a series of 14 open-access research reports between 2008 – 2025 before closing in December 2025.

For nearly two decades, PIL worked in small teams on large, national research projects about information seeking in the digital age. Using social science and data science methods, researchers studied how college students interact with information resources for school, life, work, and more recently, how they engage with algorithms, and news during the first 100 days of Covid-19. Altogether, more than 22,500 participants were interviewed or surveyed for PIL research reports.

Findings and recommendations from PIL studies have informed and influenced the thinking and practices of diverse constituencies from all over the world in higher education, public libraries, newspapers, nonprofits, and the workplace. For more details about PIL’s work, see the Project Information Literacy Retrospective: Insights from more than a decade of information literacy research, 2008–2022 (2022).

About the PIL Archive

As a final contribution, PIL researchers have built an archival site for continued access to PIL research reports, survey instruments, datasets, essays, and interviews with leading thinkers. Please note that hyperlinks in published reports (e.g., Provocation Series, Covid-19, Retrospective) have been migrated over as-is and have not been validated, therefore some links inside reports may be broken.

All materials provided in this archive are made available under a Creative Commons license.

The archive will be maintained for two years from September 2025 through December 2027. For that reason, we recommend that you download from this archive copies of any studies you will need in perpetuity.