Many College librarians convened at the annual meeting of the American Library Association this past weekend for a seminar on how to better serve today’s tech-savvy college students.

Among the recommendations: play more video games.

This isn’t so that library staffers can lecture students on the parallels between Bully and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but rather as a means to enable librarians to better understand how today’s students gather and process information.

According to the session’s speakers, there is a de facto language gap between “digital natives” (the students), who have grown up with technology, and “digital immigrants” (the librarians), who have had to, or will ultimately have to, learn the ins and outs of technology, in many ways like a second language.

By way of illustration, the panel explained that digital natives would never read an instruction manual before playing a new game, preferring instead to gain the information necessary to succeed in the game by playing it outright. This would argue for an “in demand” approach to training students on library tools, assisting them as they come to roadblocks on their own, as opposed to providing comprehensive training before they begin.

At a packed session for academic librarians attending the annual meeting of the American Library Association, in Washington, the topic was how to help students who have learned many of their information gathering and analysis skills from video games apply that knowledge in the library. Speakers said that gaming skills are in many ways representative of a broader cultural divide between today’s college students and the librarians who hope to teach them.

In an era when most students would have to go to a museum to see an old-fashioned card catalog, there’s no doubt that libraries have embraced technology. But speakers said that there was a larger split between students — who are “digital natives,” in one popular way of classifying people based on their experience with technology — and librarians, who are more likely to be “digital immigrants.” They may have learned the language, but it’s a second language.

George M. Needham, vice president for member services of the Online Computer Library Center, stressed that he wasn’t suggesting that college libraries “tear up the stacks to put in arcades,” but that they rethink many assumptions.

Deathsythe via insidehighered.com »