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Information literacy is an essential skill for biologists; however, most biology curricula do not intentionally integrate information literacy into classroom and laboratory exercises. There is evid...

Buzz about instant messaging (IM) customer service is becoming louder, both inside and outside the library field. In general, librarian opinions of IM are mixed and at times even combative. A survey was distributed to gather librarians' opinions of the usefulness of IM as compared to its feature-rich yet difficulty-prone sibling, commercial chat. Through detailed statistical analysis, this article provides an overview of trends in and opinions of IM reference, and offers analysis of its present and future in libraries.

The current generation of college students has used the Internet to access information since the early 1990s. No assessment of information use, quality, variety, and reliability of information generally occurs at both the student and faculty level. In this paper, we use a package of teaching methods targeted towards improving information-seeking behavior among graduate and undergraduate business majors. The effectiveness of the teaching package is assessed through an evaluation of student term papers and quality of resources used. We find that the package of teaching methods implemented does result in significant improvement in information-seeking behavior, especially among undergraduate business majors.