|START Conference Manager|
ASIST 2012 Annual Meeting
Baltimore, MD, October 26-30, 2012
ODI and Information Literacy: Personal Information Management in a World of Information Overload
Kristine Stewart, Josipa Basic and Sanda Erdelez
Emerging technologies have changed the way that we, as a society, interact with information as well as the extent to which we use technology to communicate. Information literacy in the 21st century needs to address information users as both passive and active receivers of information so that they are able to seek needed information as well as accept, gather, store, and retrieve information from a variety of sources. This includes the ability of a user to store and organize information in anticipation of a future need (Bruce, 1998).
Personal information management (PIM) is a term describing the responsibility of an individual in the collection, storage, organization, and retrieval of personal items in digital form (e.g. Files, website addresses; Boardman & Sasse, 2004) and is frequently cased in terms of an individual's ability to manage information in fulfillment of their various life roles such as parent, employee, student, etc. (Fourie, 2011). Information encountered by students requires they have practical skills that will assist them in managing unexpected information so that they may use it at a later time.
The poster presents findings of a case study involving undergraduate students enrolled in an information literacy course that were surveyed regarding their experiences managing information found online. While information literacy courses teach students to identify, seek, analyze, and use needed information, it does not prepare them to manage and store information encountered while online.
The research questions guiding this study are as follows: