Information behaviour of the researcher of the future

This study was commissioned by the British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee to identify how the specialist researchers of the future, currently in their school or pre-school years, are likely to access and interact with digital resources in five to ten years\u27 time. This is to help library and information services to anticipate and react to any new or emerging behaviours in the most effective way. In this report, the authors define the \u27Google generation\u27 as those born after 1993 and explore the world of a cohort of young people with little or no recollection of life before the web. The broad aims of the study are to gather and assess the available evidence to establish: ? whether or not, as a result of the digital transition and the vast range of information resources being digitally created, young people, the \u27Google generation\u27, are searching for and researching content in new ways and whether this is likely to shape their future behaviour as mature researchers? ? whether or not new ways of researching content will prove to be any different from the ways that existing researchers and scholars carry out their work? ? to inform and stimulate discussion about the future of libraries in the internet era These questions are of enormous strategic importance but they need to be balanced against considerable media hype surrounding the \u27Google generation phenomenon, so a healthy degree of critical distance is needed. A bewildering array of titles has attached itself to a younger generation that is growing up in an internet dominated, media-rich culture: Net Generation, Digital Natives, Millennials and many others. The untested assumption is that this generation is somehow qualitatively \u27different\u27 from what went before: that they have different aptitudes, attitudes, expectations and even different communication and information \u27literacies\u27 and that these will somehow transfer to their use of libraries and information services as they enter higher education and research careers