Education for Change, in collaboration with The Research Partnership, has been engaged by the British Library and the JISC to undertake a groundbreaking 3-year study on the research behaviour of the ‘Generation Y’ scholar.

The study is tracking young doctoral students’ (those born between 1982 – 1994) information-seeking behaviour, analysing their habits in online and physical research environments and assessing their usage of library and information sources on and off line.

Note: a summary report of 25pp is available already from the website

This article focuses on how electronic information resources influence the information-seeking process in the social sciences and humanities, examines the information-seeking behavior of scholars in these fields, and extends the David Ellis model of information-seeking behavior for social scientists, which includes six characteristics: starting, chaining, browsing, differentiating, monitoring, and extracting. The study was conducted at Tennessee State University. Thirty active social sciences and humanities faculty and doctoral students were interviewed about their use of electronic information resources for research purposes, their perception of electronic and print materials, their opinions concerning the Ellis model, and how the model might apply to them. Based on the interview results, the researcher provides suggestions on how current information services and products can be improved to better serve social sciences and humanities researchers and makes recommendations for improving library services and technologies to better meet the needs of social sciences and humanities scholars.

Editorial
Bridging the gap between theory, research and practice of information literacy Susie Andretta

Articles
A needs analysis for information literacy provision for research: a case study in University College Dublin Avril Patterson
My students and other animals. Or a vulture, an orb weaver spider, a giant panda and 900 undergraduate business students Matthew Borg, Erica Stretton
Teaching information skills to large groups with limited time and resources Paul Verlander, Catherine Scutt
Integrating information literacy as a habit of learning – assessing the impact of a golden thread of IL through the curriculum Moira J Bent, Elizabeth A Stockdale
Experimenting with Web 2.0 to cultivate information literacy within a medical ethics, law and human rights course
Sarah Whittaker, Joanne Dunham
Supporting research at the Faculty of Medicine: the development of Imperial College London’s Medicine Information Literacy Group Jacqueline Cousins, Kate Perris pp. 60 – 67

Conference corner
The Librarians’ Information Literacy Annual Conference (LILAC) 2009 Cardiff
Owen Coxall, Samantha Abrahams, Susan Clayton, Veronica Cunnigham, Su Fagg, Katie Fraser, Marion Funnell pp.

Projects
Evolving the NHS Scotland information literacy process model Eilean Craig, Rob Westwood

Book reviews
Book Review of Devine, J. and Egger-Sider, F. (2009). Going beyond Google: the invisible web in learning and teaching. London: Facet Publishing. Jason Curtis
Book Review of Basili, C. eds. Information literacy at the crossroad of education and information policy in Europe. Rome: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche. Gwyneth Price

This project investigated whether tags and tag clouds might be a visually appealing way of aggregating and presenting skills information to students. We adopted a user-centred design approach to ensure this project (SkillClouds) met the needs of students.

Communication and collaboration with faculty are increasingly important in the development of both curriculum-integrated and stand-alone “just in time” library tutorials. In the final developmental stages of the Evidence-Based Practice online tutorials, faculty members were asked to provide input during structured faculty feedback sessions. These sessions aimed to gather feedback on tutorial structure, discipline-specific content, integrating the tutorial with class curriculum, and best marketing practices. The results demonstrate that involving faculty in the assessment of tutorials is a beneficial way to improve and promote tutorials. Another important outcome was learning more about the interests of the faculty and related curriculum.