Students - Lazy or Ignorant?

This was shared by LibGoddess on Twitter today, and given I'm determined to keep this blogging lark going for as long as possible I thought I'd offer my take on it.

I had a lot of books growing up (aged 12 I counted over a thousand), and my family were a pretty knowledgeable bunch, so it wasn't until high school that I was introduced to the library as a source of information rather than as somewhere to borrow fiction books. In Year 8, somewhere within the first few weeks of starting high school, my class were invited to the library where we were given a tour of the resources and told about the books. We were each given a topic (mine was Thomas Gainsborough) and given two weeks to use the library resources to research this topic and present the information to the librarian, who would mark it based on the resources used.

Gainsborough, from mira66 on Flickr

 Fantastic idea in principle, but the librarian was a bit of a harridan, and I didn't feel welcome in the library at all, so when I found a small paragraph on Gainsborough in a general encyclopaedia, I copied it out and handed it in, then didn't return to the library for four years. (I got a low mark for the work too, for not using the more art-specific resources available.) Curiously enough, when I returned, it was not as a reader, but as a volunteer. I must have been some kind of glutton for punishment...

Fast forward to university, and once again, I and my peers were subjected to the ubiquitous library tour. I can't remember much but it was definitely one of the less scary moments of being at university¹. However, we were given reading lists specifying exactly which books we needed, so once I could wrangle my way through the catalogue search and find the books, that was it. In fact, it wasn't until I actually got a job there, and then began my librarianship degree, that I began to learn what a library was really for and how it actually worked.

So what's my point? I think that yes, there is definitely a need for institutions to recognise that students' expectations have changed significantly since the development of search engines and online information. I still find Newton cumbersome and difficult to use, and as a cataloguer I'm always aware that while trying to catalogue to minimum bibliographic standards, I'm also trying to predict how our library users are going to search for something, and tweaking records to fit that too. And students today are all about speed. If something isn't immediately useful, they move on. I do too. I'm not going to run through eleven different resources either; if I can find one that works well enough and blag the rest then I will (though I'm trying hard to train myself out of that now!).

The Pendlebury: not very scary.

However, I think some effort has to be made on the part of the user too. Libraries run all sorts of training, but students don't take it up sufficiently. For my part, I just wasn't aware that there was all this information out there (one of those "unknown unknowns") that could help me. I could see there were periodicals on the shelf, but I didn't know what an abstract was, let alone that there were indexes for these abstracts that I could search! Perhaps if we'd been set a project like I had in Year 8 I would have learnt about this at university? Certainly the Pendlebury librarian was a heck of a lot less scary than the one at high school. But my lecturers and supervisors had done the work for me, so I perceived no need to find out beyond the framework of that hallowed reading list. And this is where I think maybe academics and libraries (and teachers and school librarians) really need to work together. Research skills should be taught in much the same way as geography, or science, or Notre Dame polyphony. And they need promoting, not just by the libraries but also by the departments and their academics. If I knew that there was a genuine reason to grapple with a resource, I'd have had a go, rather than resorting to Google.

Remember that Oxfam advert? Give a man a fish, he'll eat that day; give him a net, he'll eat for the rest of his life? Students don't need spoonfeeding. Trust me, it's nice, but ultimately it doesn't help anyone. What you produce is a generation of "students" who expect everything to be done for them. Instead of a reading list, give them the link to the library's electronic resource page. Tell them what each resource is, and how it will help them, what you thought of it, its advantages and disadvantages, and then let them go forth and discover. They'll thank you in the long run.

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¹The scariest moment was definitely at my first supervision, on keyboard technique, when I had to harmonise a melody at the piano, had my efforts subsequently pulled to pieces and I was asked whether I thought I should actually be there. Bit of a sore point still, as you can see.