Search

Semistructured interviews were conducted with community college students in Florida and New York, two diverse states with robust community college systems, to explore their self-perceptions of their information literacy (IL) needs. Findings indicate that students value IL in their personal lives, their academic work, and their careers, though it means somewhat different things to them in each of those areas. They think of IL in terms of skills rather than threshold concepts, and they feel that the most important skill is finding information, followed by evaluating information.

This paper shares the results of semi-structured interviews with 30 community college librarians who have instruction duties. The interviews explored these librarians’ perceptions of students’ information literacy (IL) strengths and weaknesses as well as their views of students’ self-perceptions. Participants believe that students are confident in their ability to find information and are proficient in using technology to find information. Participants consider students’ overconfidence to be an IL weakness along with: not understanding the research process; being overwhelmed by information; and, in some cases, having poor reading comprehension skills. Views are mixed as to whether students’ IL skills vary based on their program of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]