Digital literacy for electronic encyclopedias

The purpose of this research was to examine the information-seeking processes employed by junior high school students from Inuvik, Northwest Territories, Canada when using CD-ROM encyclopedias. The study revealed that participants needed both instruction and practice to develop the skills and strategies needed for fall-text searching of CD-ROM encyclopedias. The participants tended to use search terms only from the original question, had difficulty selecting topics and articles from the retrieved list, and did not read long articles as carefully as short articles. Instruction related to information-seeking skills and strategies should focus on generating search terms, selecting topics from a retrieved list, and, skimming and scanning through text to find the answer.