High school students and library research experiences

Next week a colleague and I are doing a brief presentation for coworkers about what high school students do and don't learn about libraries and library research while in high school. She will discuss a University of Montana poster session at ALA last summer, and I will discuss a session by Kellian Clink at the Minnesota Library Association conference last fall. In both cases, college librarians surveyed and interviewed high school librarians at their institutions' "feeder schools," the high schools from which a number of their entering freshmen graduate. Many high school libraries and media centers have had their book budgets decreased or frozen for years, although state programs do provide access to online databases. And high school librarians report that students are creating more PowerPoints and iMovies than research papers. This has interesting implications for those of us doing college-level library instruction, about what concepts first-year students have experienced (library databases, online catalogs, citing sources, Dewey classification) and those they may not (evaluating sources, controlled vocabulary, synthesizing & analyzing information.) My colleague hopes to do a similar study of feeder schools of private colleges in Minnesota. The findings should be interesting.