Alison J. Head, founder and director of Project Information Literacy and University Libraries Visiting Scholar for the 2016-2017 academic year, will give a presentation on how students conduct research in the digital age. The lecture is 10 a.m. March 16 in Love Library, Room 218.

Various faculty members and librarians will join Head in a panel discussion at 2 p.m. for continued discussion about critical literacies in the information age.

Since 2008, more than 13,000 college students and recent graduates from more than 60 United States colleges and universities have been surveyed and interviewed as part of Project Information Literacy, a national and ongoing series of studies.

Survey findings show that many students are lost in a thicket of information. Getting started on research assignments and narrowing down a topic is far more difficult for students than searching for sources to use. Many students turn to professors, friends, family members – or no one at all – for help with research, rather than asking librarians.

Head’s presentation will introduce an information-seeking model, present key research takeaways and discuss how academic librarians have developed solutions for supporting undergraduate research.

Head is a research affiliate at the metaLAB at Harvard University, a research group studying the future of libraries. She will launch Project Information Literacy’s latest research study, which looks at undergraduate research behaviors in library learning spaces.

Nebraska sophomore, junior and senior students will be included in the study’s focus group sample, along with undergraduates from 10 other community colleges and four-year public and private colleges.

For more about Head’s appointment as the Libraries Visiting Scholar, click here. For more information about Project Information Literacy, click here.