Carol Saller is the chief editor of the Chicago Manual of Style.
In a recent post on the Lingua Franca blog, she described a
conversation with a group of university librarians: The group
unanimously perceived a lack of skills among its clientele:
Students are routinely flummoxed as to how to search for or
evaluate the sources they need in their work. … The extent to
which college students are unprepared to conduct research may be
surprising to those who assume that young adults are
automatically proficient at any computer-related task. “Many
students don’t actually know how to interpret the citations that
they find in print or online, and as a result, they don’t
understand what to search for,” says Georgiana McReynolds,
management and social-sciences librarian at MIT. “They search
for book chapters in Google because they don’t recognize a book
citation compared to an article citation. Or they don’t know
which is the title of the article as opposed to the title of the
journal. Or they can’t decipher all the nu