College students always start at Google when they have an assignment to do, right? They ignore all those journals and databases colleges and universities spend so much money for, right? That seems to be the conventional wisdom these days anyway. But First Monday has a paper in its current edition that disputes that bit of accepted truth. The research was done at St. Mary’s College of California among higher level humanities and social sciences students. The researchers found that a majority of these students began their research by consulting course readings or the library’s Web site rather than at Google, Yahoo, or Wikipedia. Obviously, more research is needed to verify these findings and generalize to other campuses.

I was fascinated by this article. It looks like a solid bit of research that directly contradicts what we hear about how libraries’ web sites are virtually ignored by college students. At least at this college, that is not the case. I’d love to know what’s going on at other campuses.