Where are the digital natives?

Sometimes it's useful to look at the way our former students and library users behave after they move out of the children's room and high school. A recent study of university students in Illinois shows that many of them have very little idea of how to search for information and a very limited view of how librarians can help them. Of course, we'd like to think the students who participated in this study were the ones who never bothered to visit the library during their elementary and high school years, but we know that most of the university-bound students do use the library. Why don't they understand more about what goes on there? According to this study most of them are still dependent on Google as their source of information, but they don't know how to do a good search of Google, much less use other databases and search engines. Have youth librarians been spending too much time demonstrating print information sources? Have we relied too much on giving out lists of resources and not helping them to ask questions about their search topic? Many teachers are unfamiliar with the sources, especially online sources, that are now available and they often don't guide students in asking the right questions. And the children, for all their glib familiarity with digital tools, are not the digital natives we've been told about. Just because they can text messages faster than the eye can see doesn't mean they can find what they need to know. We should respect their familiarity with the tools, but also respect our own knowledge of how to find information and what information is worth finding. Take a look at the Illinois study and then think about how you can ensure that the students in your library today won't be as clueless as the ones in the report.