Chapter 4. University Students’ Information Strategies: From Institutional
4.4. Resource legitimacy
University Students’ Information Strategies 53 one point of the network to another. USB drives and emailing are the main technical solutions adopted for these transfers. The thumb-drives – that are also MP3 players – prove very useful for sending files from one computer to the other in the same room even though the PCs are connected to high speed networks. They thus constitute a kind of “digital backpack”. E-mail has also taken on the innovative function of a
“document management system”. Students open various accounts so as to benefit from larger storage space; they create thematic mailboxes and distribute their messages among them. Sorting and finding functions thus make it easy to locate a particular file according to criteria such as date, subject or sender. Even multi- versioning is made possible by the “send again” option. Students have thus constructed remarkably efficient working spaces and file management systems, whose functionalities are not so different from the ever-anticipated “digital campus”
political projects.
These practices present a significant evolution with regard to writing and, to a greater extent, university work. Firstly, students now depend to a great extent upon a technical tool which is not as portable as pen and paper. Secondly, they now no longer perceive documents in a material, tangible way. Writing has become more transient, diffuse and somehow less stable than when it was inscribed on a sheet of paper. The loss of a file is an everyday phenomenon and the mere idea of completeness seems superfluous as documents are always in progress, with diverse versions distributed on various storage spots. Above all, the distinction between what is “mine” and what is “theirs” is sometimes rather blurred. This issue goes far beyond the scope of this paper but we hypothesize that the new materiality of texts changes the ways in which students consider the knowledge they produce, consult, or exploit. When displayed on the same screen and sometimes inside the same word- processor frame, texts become so formally similar that the particularity of one’s own contribution seems less apparent. Handwriting is effortless [PIO 05] as compared to typewriting, but our relationship to the text and to knowledge is certainly quite different according to whether you “cut and paste5” or copy out in writing the same piece of text.
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This complexity adds considerable difficulty to the students’ IR task. The boundary between what a professor might consider a valid source and what is unacceptable is not always easy to perceive. The university’s standards of rhetorical and formal quality for submitted work are high and students must learn how to meet these standards. However, the texts and information found by students on the Web are only seldom the work of recognized authors. Editorial or scientific “filters” do not operate online and technical algorithms or economic interests often prevail in the selection and visibility of texts. At the same time, political, economic and even academic pundits, after having repeatedly announced the advent of the information society, now proclaim the age of knowledge. These enthusiastic and idealistic pronouncements promote the idea of instantaneous, intuitive and direct access to all world knowledge. According to this vision, the need for mediation seems outdated and superfluous.
Students actually do use computers and the Internet in almost every domain of their private life: to download music, to talk to friends, to publish or exchange information, to buy online, etc. They are thus predominantly techno-literate and quite able to “find things on the Web”. Yet they also have a clear perception of their professors’ demands and know that they cannot “only refer to online sources” and that “there should be books” on their bibliography, as two students explained. In this particular case, they had all the information they needed to finish their report but were still searching the OPAC for books. They are faced with the contradiction between strong intellectual and formal demands and social discourse tending to promote the idea that all the information they need is at their fingertips. Students must cope with this tension between hard to access but legitimate source material and easy to find but much more undifferentiated texts on the Web. Although they think that they have mastered online search techniques, students must in fact combine two types of skills: firstly, skills that will help them select, from among the numerous texts found through search engines, the ones that match their professors’
requirements, and secondly, skills allowing them to master the specialized tools and approaches needed to access most scientific resources.
This often proves a hard task for beginners, as they only have an approximate knowledge of the scientific domains when they start off at university [COU 97].
However, professors and instructors implicitly consider that most of the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in an academic environment are already obtained by students upon their arrival [ROM 00; MIL 03]. For example, high-school students generally have only very limited skills in word-processing. However, as they find when they begin coursework at university, their professors require summaries, indexes and other advanced forms of textual layout requiring advanced skills. These skills are thus usually learned from friends on an informal and incomplete “hit and miss” basis. The same observation can be made in the field of IR. University lecturers and professors usually distribute bibliographies at the beginning of their
University Students’ Information Strategies 55 courses, with sources intended to provide wider or more complete coverage of ideas discussed during the class lecture. These bibliographies are structured according to strict norms, but very few teachers actually take the time to present them. Students are thus supposed to comprehend the subtle formal differences between a monograph6, a scholarly journal or an edited book. Little or no advice is given to students to help them look up or locate documents. For example, when a lecturer includes a scholarly article in his bibliography he does not tell students not to try and find it by searching the OPAC since individual journal articles themselves are not searchable.
Therefore, students turn to what they know best: Google®. They particularly appreciate the fact that whatever words they choose for their Google searches, their success rate is much higher than with structured library resources [DES 06].
Furthermore, as they navigate from site to site, they manage to collect pieces of information that turn out to give them a better understanding of their subject than the list of references they are expected to use as points of entry into a particular domain.
On the Internet, they find pieces of texts, extracts, abstracts, book reviews, comments and opinions, all of which provide them, very quickly and at a low cognitive cost, with enough information to meet their professors’ demands7. As an extreme example, a student explained that he had “read” one of the recommended books on the Internet. The book itself was not available on the Net, but he considered that what he read about it must be more valuable than anything he might have been able to gain from actually reading it himself.
The issue of source credibility often arises next when students have to cite their sources. Though they sometimes wonder how to cite a Wikipedia® entry, most realize that only certain types of documents can be included in their bibliographies.
Sources found on the Internet such as the content of a shopping basket filled in a Cyber-library or the advice of a “blogger”, need to be “validated”. It is at this point that they turn once again to the institution, in order to confront their Internet findings with the credible and authoritative resources of the university OPAC system or library holdings. Two students, who had to write a paper about “Second Empire Parks & Gardens”, had learned while searching the Web that “Haussmann had something to do with” the design of Parisian parks at that time. Their search finally yielded no convincing results because the books they found interesting were located in a research library inaccessible to first year students. Despite this problem, these students firmly believed that Haussmann was an author, because his name appears on the indexed OPAC subject list as an author’s name. This example demonstrates
6The term “monograph” while it would seem to be transparent, is never used in high schools.
7 A nationwide survey of students and academics in the Netherlands found that two-thirds of respondents believed that searching the Internet yielded enough or more than enough information [VOO 99].
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the difficulties faced by novice students in their attempts to conduct expert searches.
The semantic complexity of the screen pages adds to the technical difficulty of the query process. However, more than anything else, they lack the specialized knowledge required to formulate a pertinent query or to interpret the codified and norm-specific information displayed on the screen [DES 00].
For experts, the OPAC is an extremely useful tool, yet because of its rigorous and strict structure8, it constitutes an obstacle for novice students. These students often do not even make an attempt to understand the OPAC system, since their efforts would not necessarily even “pay off”. The two empty-handed students finally turned to the librarian, who guided them to the right shelf after they showed her the sheets of paper printed from the Web.