Information encountering and management in information literacy instruction of undergraduate, students

The nature of the information-rich environment of the 21st century has affected the ways in which students’ access information. Students no longer have to seek information; they acquire it passively through their everyday use of the Internet. This paper presents findings of a study involving the information encountering experiences of undergraduate students and the potential role of personal information collection, management, and retrieval in information literacy instruction. Undergraduate students enrolled in an information literacy course were surveyed regarding their experiences online with information encountering and personal information management. Survey questions were adopted from the information encountering scale developed by Wise & Erdelez (2012) and consisted of twelve questions focused on the noticing, stopping, examining, and capturing steps of the Information encountering model (Erdelez, 2004). The study indicates that the vast majority of the undergraduate students responding to the survey were frequently encountering unexpected information while online, but were not capturing this information for future use using built-in, web-based tools. While information literacy courses teach students to identify, seek, analyze, and use needed information, they do not prepare them to manage and retrieve unexpected information encountered while using the Internet.