Personal Blogs

• Google Generation – Those born on or after 1993 into a world of rich and abundant information
• There are many extravagant claims about how different they interact with technology and the world
• Able to multi-task and multi-reference
• Perception can influence the views of whether generations are different – Longitudinal Study used to see if there are generational differences

Following two examples detail why stereotyping can be incorrect

• Digital Dissidents (turning their back to technology and in the younger generation)
• Silver Surfers (typically taken early retirement from professional jobs and spending 4 more hours/week than a google generation)

• Information Literacy – people perceive library as print and archive (print legacy) and search is seen as google.  One research showed 98% of research points start with search engines and only 2% with libraries

• Web searching is quick for the young with less time spent on reviewing relevancy and accuracy and quality and clicking through web pages.  Find it hard to express and translate this information.  They search by adding sentences (natural language) rather than through through key words.   Think they are better at multi-tasking and preference for Visual Information Retrieval over Text Information

• New form of online reading becoming evident that uses metadata and abstracts to help  and find the full text and that this is how users are reading online information

• The physical library offered a strong visual mind map that clearly distinguished fiction from journals to other forms of print and gave the visitor a feel for the full organism of information.  The electronic provision has far less form and that the total understanding of the information landscape is far harder to identify with and understand.  There is the need of a clarity map to help people find and locate the information they need in the electronic form in the same way that the library use to give in times gone by.

References - Open University - Dr Ian Rowlands. (2008). The Google Generation. Available: http://stadium.open.ac.uk/stadia/preview.php?s=31&whichevent=1173. Last accessed 10th February 2015