Today the Krafty Librarian has an interesting post up about the trend of information commons in academic libraries. Be sure to check out her thoughts, as well as the Chronicle article that inspired the post.

The information commons issue has popped up from time to time in my reference class, and I'm always a bit unsure how to address it. Generally the question is broached as a books or computers - death is not an option type of question. Personally, I can't work up outrage that rows of books are being replaced by computers. Okay, I could probably work it up, but it would take awhile. I'm also not too concerned that students might not be aware of the resources that are available to them whether they are print or electronic. For me, there is a much bigger concern that needs to be addressed before we can truly begin to handle these issues.

I know this may sound terrible, but I don't think the majority of students necessarily care whether or not they are getting the best information. What they care about is that they are getting the most convenient information. I've noticed over the past several years that students seem to be getting lazier. And that's not a slam on my students, but just a comment on students as a whole. I see them at the college where I teach, I see them in my library, and I hear about them from my friends who still teach at the university level. It's something I can kind of understand. For many students doing research is just a hoop they have to jump through to write a paper (hoop #2) to pass a class (hoop #3) to get a degree (hoop #4) to get a job. And that would be tolerable if the student went on to a career that didn't require good research skills. Unfortunately, a sizeable portion of these students will take their sorry ass research skills that they acquired in undergrad with them into their graduate and doctoral work. Scary, isn't it?

So what should we do? My response to that would be what can we do? Teachers and librarians can talk until they are blue in the face about the right way to research, but until students take responsibility for what they learn in and out of the classroom our hands our tied.

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