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Aims

This article constitutes an edited version of a report commissioned by the British Library and JISC in April 2007 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' time[1]. The purpose of the report was to guide library and information services to anticipate and react to any new or emerging behaviours in the most effective way. For the purposes of this paper we define the “Google generation” 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 were to gather and assess the available evidence to establish:

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    whether, as a result of the digital transition and the vast range of information resources being digitally created, young people, the “Google generation”, are searching for and researching content in new ways and whether this is likely to shape their future behaviour as mature researchers;

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    whether new ways of researching content will prove to be any different from the ways that existing researchers and scholars carry out their work; and

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    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 “Google 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 “different” from what went before: that they have different aptitudes, attitudes, expectations and even different communication and information “literacies” and that these will somehow transfer to their use of libraries and information services as they enter higher education and research careers.

Methods

The most appropriate methodology for tackling this study would, of course, have been a longitudinal study over a lengthy period that tracked the same cohort of young people through their schooling, their time as undergraduates and their early research careers, as graduate students or doctoral fellows....

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