Here’s another report to read. It was produced by the British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee. It is on my reading list for this afternoon but I’m recommending it now because when I scanned through I saw some interesting statements like:
CIBER’s considered view is that the real issue that the library community should be concerned about is the rise of the e-book, not social networking. It should certainly continue to experiment and to keep a watching brief on these tools, especially for examples of best practice from serious business use (e.g. in marketing) and in course delivery. [p. 17]
Another reason I’m writing about it is so that I can show you the cover of the report.
Woah! That is intense.
Ars Technica has an article about the report titled The “Google generation” not so hot at Googling, after all in which they list some findings about people born 1993 or later.
- They like to cut-and-paste. “There is a lot of anecdotal evidence and plagiarism is a serious issue.”
- They prefer visual information over text. “But text is still important… For library interfaces, there is evidence that multimedia can quickly lose its appeal, providing short-term novelty.”
- They multitask all the time. “It is likely that being exposed to online media early in life may help to develop good parallel processing skills.”