The INFO Project Blog

For those who follow the HIFA2015 (Health Information for All by 2015) Listserv, there has been an interesting thread on the future of information dissemination to and from health workers in developing countries.

Much of the discourse has been about the cost and effectiveness of print materials on one hand, and the difficulties of accessing the Internet and other electronic resources such as CD-ROMs on the other. Some of the posts have been about the way health workers absorb and communicate information with proponents and opponents of print and electronic formats airing their views.

Of course, as with most of these types of debates, the future path lies somewhere in the middle–printed reference materials, the Internet, e-forums, blogs, e-learning, e-books, etc., all have their place. The challenge will be to teach future generations of information seekers and information communicators to use all these vehicles to achieve their goals.

Into this prolonged discussion comes a post from David Morley, President of Teaching-aids At Low Cost, a UK-based non-governmental organization, to an associated listserv at Child2015 about a report from the University College in London(UCL).

Information behaviour of the researcher of the future, prepared by UCL’s CIBER division, has implications for those involved in disseminating information to and from health workers in developing countries as well as many other audiences. The report looks particularly at the information retrieving and evaluating habits of the “Google Generation,” those born after 1993. A colleague of David Morley’s who studied the report selected the following extracts:

“Internet research shows that the speed of young people’s web searching means that little time is spent in evaluating information, either for relevance, accuracy or authority”

“Young people have a poor understanding of their information needs and thus find it difficult to develop effective search strategies.”

“Faced with a long list of search hits, young people find it difficult to assess the relevance of the materials presented and often print off pages with no more than a perfunctory glance at them.”

“Many young people do not find library-sponsored resources intuitive and therefore prefer to use Google or Yahoo instead: these offer a familiar, if simplistic solution, for their study needs”

“Observational studies have shown that young people scan online pages very rapidly (boys especially) and click extensively on hyperlinks -rather than reading sequentially. Users make very little use of advanced search facilities, assuming that search engines `understand’ their queries. They tend to move rapidly from page to page, spending little time reading or digesting information and they have difficulty making relevance judgements about the pages they retrieve.”

“Each month, across the globe, nearly a million new users join the internet, joining the 750 million already connected.”

There is a lot of other information in this 32-page report including implications for policy makers, for research libraries

“The picture that emerges from Internet research is that most visitors to scholarly sites view only a few pages, many of which do not even contain real content, and in any case do not stop long enough to do any real reading.”)

and for “information experts”

“Any barrier to access: be that additional log-ins, payment or hard copy, are too high for most consumers and information behind those barriers will increasingly be ignored.”

So what does this all mean for the health worker, researcher, promoter, midwife in a developing country who has to stay abreast of the latest guidelines, the latest research, and who has little enough time to do their “day/night jobs” let alone spend hours in front of a computer screen learning and communicating their best practices to colleagues around the world? And just as importantly, what does it mean for their clients?

To this “silver [haired] searcher” it means that books in print still have an important role to play in health-care communication and education, that leaflets and pamphlets, and other client education take-home materials still have a useful shelf-life, and while I marvel at the wonders of the Internet and beyond, let’s make use of all our resources both old and new to promote healthy living and to save lives.

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