UCLA librarians have long had a hunch that many undergraduates lack the basic information skills required to do some of the research and coursework assigned to them.

So in an effort to help students make better use of library resources, librarians decided to conduct a survey. The results, to be released later this month, give students low marks for information literacy and point to critical gaps in their ability to locate, retrieve and evaluate information.

UCLA students are not atypical in this regard when you consider how the general public accepts information, particularly that found on the Internet, without question, librarians said.

Library Survey

The UCLA Library surveyed 453 undergraduates on using and evaluating sources of information. Some key findings: Thought an oil company's Web site was an objective source for air pollution: Yes: 67% No: 27% Don't know: 5% Could identify a correct journal article citation for a bibliography: Yes: 38% No: 55% Don't know: 6% Would copy a paragraph from a source into their paper without a footnote: Yes: 36% No: 64% Numbers are rounded and may not add up to 100%.

After testing 453 undergraduates on topics such as library resources, online-searching techniques and information-seeking concepts, the UCLA librarians found that frequent library users scored higher than those who weren't; that seniors scored higher than others, while there was no significant difference among the average scores of freshmen, sophomores and juniors; and that humanities majors scored higher than those majoring in the social sciences or sciences.

The answers to specific questions were more surprising, library administrators said. When asked to rate an oil company's Web site as an objective source of information for a paper on air pollution, only 27% correctly said it was not a valuable source.

"A relatively large percentage of students took the corporate Web site for gospel, not critically evaluating what the source of information was," said University Librarian Gloria Werner.

Perhaps even more astonishing were the responses to a question on citations, librarians added.

Asked in what instances they would footnote information they were taking from an article for a paper they were writing, only one-third said they would use a footnote if they copied a whole paragraph; another 4.6% said they didn't know. And 56% said they would not include a footnote if they took an idea from an article but wrote it in their own words. A total of 76% said they would use a footnote if they quoted a sentence from the article.

Every year, about 15,000 UCLA students attend the library's lecture on information-gathering. Apparently, that is not enough, said administrators, who want to enhance their efforts in conjunction with faculty.

"This is not a library issue alone," said Janice Koyama, associate university librarian for public services. "It really is, on many levels, a faculty issue of strengthening student academic performance and overall quality of student learning."

The library plans to establish an initiative to bring faculty and librarians together to improve student information skills, particularly within the curriculum.

Creating a one- or two-unit course on library and information-gathering skills, to be taken along with general education courses or included in the College of Letters & Science cluster program, would help resolve the problem, librarians said.

"The facts may change over time, but if students know how to find information and how to synthesize what they find, those skills should last them forever," Werner said.

For more details or a copy of the report, e-mail Dawn Setzer at dsetzer@library.ucla.edu.