Information behaviour of the researcher of the future

This ciber briefing paper, commissioned by JISC and The British Library, suggests that the term 'Google Generation' is a myth. The paper was based on a literature review plus some new primary data from a study of how people actually use the British Library and JISC websites.
The study investigated whether young people (the Google generation) are searching for and researching content in new ways, and if they are, whether this is likely to shape their future behaviour as mature researchers. Will these new ways be any different to the ways that current researchers and scholars work?
They found that typical information seeking behaviours are diverse, and include skimming, spending a lot of time online just navigating, browsing rather than in-depth reading of a document, lots of downloading a lot of content but not necessarily spending a lot of time reading that content, and relying on favoured brands such as Google.
Young people, the authors concluded, spend little time evaluating what they find, they have a poor understanding of their information needs, they use natural language rather than analysing their needs to identify relevant keywords, they don't necessarily understand how the internet is structured, and they may find library resources unintuitive to use - they prefer Google or Yahoo for their simplicity and familiarity.
Young people like the social networking aspect of the internet, but for socialising, not for study and work.
A number of assumptions about the Google generation are discussed and are found wanting in many cases, and often not unique to this generation - "In a real sense, we are all Google generation now".
The message for librarians and others is that we need to make our resources as easy to use as possible, and these resources should be better integrated with commercial search engines. More effort needs to be invested in ensuring that young people acquire appropriate levels of information and digital literacy skills at an early age.