Undergraduate Use of Government Information: What Citation Studies Tell us About Instruction Strategies

Among librarians, government information has a reputation for being a valuable but underused resource. A literature review of undergraduate citation studies, however, reveals that the use of government information has apparently increased so much for some subject areas that, after books and journals, it has become one of the most frequently used sources for primary and scholarly works. Nonetheless, librarians still tend to consider documents as an "other" category that is specialized and hard to use. Typical library instruction sessions that focus heavily on books and journals can have the unfortunate side effect of discouraging students from using online government information, as do classroom policies that discourage Web research in general. A citation analysis of government information in 194 bibliographies from an undergraduate information literacy course provides insights about how students find and use government information and suggests strategies for integrating government information into standard library instruction.