Project Information Literacy, Inc. (PIL) is a public benefit 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation registered in the State of California, whose Founder and Executive Director is Alison Head, Ph.D. Alison is also a senior researcher at the metaLAB at Harvard University.
PIL consists of a group of library and information science and new media researchers who conduct national and ongoing research about the information seeking behavior of college students and recent graduates in the digital age. All of the researchers on the PIL Team have undergone CITI training in research ethics and are certified to collect data for PIL studies on campuses where PIL has obtained IRB approval.
PIL is not paid any funds by institutions that participate in our studies. Likewise, institutions in our study samples do not receive any compensation for participating in PIL studies. PIL does share data from surveys we have conducted on their campuses and a brief trends report highlighting key findings. PIL pays the cost of any incentives that may be awarded to survey respondents who enter one of our survey contests (e.g., $100 Amazon gift card to one contest winner per campus).
PIL accepts forms of funding to support our ongoing research efforts. To date, PIL’s research has been funded by federal grants (Institute of Museum and Library Services), private foundations (John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation), and professional organizations, i.e., Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), the largest division of the American Library Association (ALA). Gifts for supporting research have been provided by ProQuest, Cengage Learning, and Cable in the Classroom.
Alison Head, PIL’s Director, received support from the University of Washington’s iSchool as salary where she was employed as a research scientist from 2009-2016 and from the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University as a stipend during 2011-2012 when she was a research fellow. Alison Head serves as a advisory board member on the Open Syllabus Project, based at Columbia University, and on WGBH Boston’s PBS KIDS project.
Between 2008 through July 2016, PIL worked in partnership with the University of Washington’s iSchool. The iSchool provided graduate student research assistance, and services for grant administration. Also, the school provided ongoing mentor support from Mike Eisenberg, former PIL Co-Director and current PIL board member and Emeritus Professor and Dean Emeritus in the iSchool.
It is PIL’s policy that funds and compensation for PIL’s research efforts have not, and will never, influence the content, topics, findings, and interpretations of data PIL makes in its research reports. The views expressed in PIL’s research materials are purely those of PIL’s researchers, based on the rigorous research we conduct. As researchers at PIL, if we claim or appear to be experts on certain topics about information literacy, education, or students, we will only make such assertions based on our expertise, research findings, and rigorous data analysis.
We make an active effort and are deeply committed to verifying any trend, quote, statistic, or representation of data we present in PIL materials. We are committed to making all of PIL’s research materials (research reports, “Smart Talk” interviews, and videos) open access and freely available for use and re-use. Our research reports are available on the PIL Web site, ERIC, and SSRN. We have also published research in the open access peer-reviewed journals, including First Monday, College & Research Libraries, Library and Information Research and publications such as Berkman’s Internet Monitor, an annual report of research trends about the Internet.
If you have any questions about these disclosures, please feel free to Contact Us.
Snail mail address: Project Information Literacy, Inc., 4760 Montecito Avenue, Santa Rosa, CA 95404
(Originally posted: February 5, 2013, updated: December 16, 2020)