Digital Natives and Humanities Scholars: Similarities and Differences

Transcription

1 Digital Natives and Humanities Scholars: Similarities and Differences Beth Twomey San Jose State University September 16, 2010 Professor Busby, LIBR 230

2 Each new generation of incoming university students brings their own set of challenges. The rapid adoption of technology based information gathering and communication by the current generation of students has been so pervasive as to become the definitive factor in how other generations view them and the challenges they bring to the university setting. Digital natives, Millennials, Net generation, Googlegen, or Generation Y are amongst the most common designations and what they share is the notion that this generation is somehow apart from all previous ones since it is the first to grow up mouse in hand, cell phone to ear or busy thumbs and making friends that they never, ever actually meet. Academic libraries in particular, as information hubs in the university are scrambling to understand and meet the needs of digital natives and in the process agonizing over whether the library is fast becoming an irrelevant institution. Charles Becker reminds us, however that "we should ask ourselves if we would behave as Millennials if provided the technology available today. The obvious answer is that most of us already are." (Becker, 342) Many librarians have been studying what Millennial's information seeking behavior actually is and how it is different than previous generation's approaches to information acquisition and use. However, these may be somewhat artificial or inflated differences as what are commonly called "digital immigrants" adopt similar behaviors and strategies as Millennials in their preferred uses of technology. So what defines Millennial's information seeking behavior? Becker summarizes the literature with the following attributes (paraphrased here): they crave choice, personalization and flexibility prefer the experiential, exploratory and interactive over static, passive and repetitious they are format agnostic impatient, not tolerant of delay, expect instant gratification confident, community oriented, highly collaborative, practical and results oriented 2

3 multi-taskers, read less and in short bites nomadic communication style (cell phones/texting) digital natives and proficient users of technology (Becker, 346) In order to cast these characteristics into the context of the academic library and see how they may affect desired library services, it is useful to compare the characteristics of digital natives with something they may one day become. In this paper, digital native's characteristics will be compared and contrasted with humanities scholars utilizing a study done by Shifra Baruchson-Arbib and Jenny Bronstein on Jewish scholars. While seemingly a very specific and narrow study, Baruchson-Arbib and Bronstein found that Jewish scholar's research habits were largely similar to those habits identified as typical of scholars in the humanities. The most common characteristics of humanities scholars in general, shared by Jewish scholars include: reliance on physical books and journals in both physical and digital form heavy use of citation tracking for discovering new resources frequent use of browsing (usually in the library) to see what materials may be there greater dependency on primary/archival resources than other disciplines utilization of the "invisible college" or what could be considered social networking amongst academics who share similar research interests, through the use of , face to face meetings, listservs and other electronic means. tend to work alone active library users will utilize electronic information sources that are well organized and serve their needs (Baruchson-Arbib and Bronstein, ) It is clear that scholars in the humanities exhibit many information seeking traits that run counter to the practice of digital natives. Rather than being format agnostic like digital natives, they are quite specific in their needs and preferences. The frequent browsing and deep reading required are at a 3

4 slower pace that does not demand quick answers. Humanities scholars tend to work alone, though they rely on colleagues in their "invisible college" to learn about new resources and discuss their research. They tend to be active library users and rely less on sources like the internet. For academic libraries that are in universities, balancing the needs of incoming freshmen with the needs of accomplished and experienced scholars has always occurred. Today, however, with new materials budgets in steep decline and many believing that the library can be done away with altogether and replaced by a computer driven information commons, balancing the needs of humanities scholars and the young Millennials becomes much more difficult. Baruchson-Arbib and Bronstein do point out that humanities scholars will utilize electronic resources which meet their needs. One way to simulate the browsing experience which is increasingly found in databases, are recommendations in the form of "other people who read this article also looked at ", built in citation trackers that allow scholars to check citations before even investing their time in the article and increasing numbers of free online journals in the humanities which are cheap and easy to access. These are services that may make the use of databases instead of search engines easier and more accessible for Millennials as well. Perhaps one of the biggest differences in the ways humanities scholars and digital natives do research was noted by Wendy Holliday and Qui Li, It is quite easy for a novice searcher to bump into, or encounter, information on the web or in a general library database that is somewhat relevant to their topic. If students are not inclined to delve deeper or forced to seek a more focused topic, they often stop at the first information they encounter in their initial search (Holliday and Li, 364) 4

5 This indicates that perhaps the behavior of scholars and Millenials is not so different when it comes to initial information gathering behaviors. Instead, the difference lies in when they choose to end the information gathering process. In fact, differences between Millenials and more experienced humanities scholars may be, in fact, a matter of experience! Certainly Millienials who choose to pursue degrees in the humanities will be schooled in the methodologies and academic requirements of their discipline which is bound to transform many aspects of their information seeking behavior. That said, perhaps the largest danger is not that services to Millennials will suffer-after all, having library materials in multiple formats, increasing the browsability of the catalog and databases will be helpful for all researchers. Other features of the Millennial friendly library such as cafes, couches and lots of computers work for scholars as well, offering them another way to meet with their "invisible colleges" while still offering quiet spaces for browsing. It is the humanities scholars reliant on primary sources and who frequently utilize monographs (Baruchson-Arbib and Bronstein, 2271) that are most likely to find themselves without the resources they need to complete their research in their home institutions. References Baruchson-Arbib, S. and Bronstein, J. (2007). Humanists as information users in the digital age: the case of Jewish studies scholars in Israel. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58: 14, Retrieved September 11, 2010 from Wiley InterScience. Becker, Charles H. (2009). Student values and research: Are Millennials really changing the future of reference and research? Journal of Library Administration, 49: 4,

6 Retrieved September 14, 2010 from the Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts database. Holliday, W. and Li, Q. (2004). Updating our knowledge about students. Reference Services Review, 32: 4,