“Google Reigns Triumphant”?: Stemming the Tide of Googlitis via Collaborative, Situated Information Literacy Instruction

Googlitis, the overreliance on search engines for research and the resulting development of poor searching skills, is a recognized problem among today’s students. Google is not an effective research tool because, in addition to encouraging keyword searching at the expense of more powerful subject searching, it only accesses the Surface Web and is driven by advertising. American higher education unwittingly fosters the use of search engines in research by emphasizing results rather than process. Academic librarians emulate teaching faculty in their reliance on lectures, and their course-related instruction is limited in its effectiveness because it is constrained to one-shot, lecture-driven sessions. A more effective way to teach research is to collaborate with faculty via problem-based and project-oriented learning tasks that incorporate authentic discipline-specific information finding and critical thinking into assignments