Project Information Literacy (PIL) is a research institute that conducts national, ongoing scholarly studies on how early adults find and use information as they progress through, and beyond, their higher education years.
Organization
Based in California's San Francisco Bay Area, Project Information Literacy, Inc. (PIL) is a public benefit 501(c)(3) organization. Alison J. Head, the executive director and lead researcher, is an expert in the field of information literacy research.
PIL began in 2008 as a partnership with the University of Washington Information School with Alison J. Head and Michael Eisenberg, dean emeritus and professor at the school, as co-directors. Both Head and Eisenberg have extensive experience conducting and publishing research on information literacy and the information-seeking behavior of Internet users. In 2012, PIL became a nonprofit with Head as sole director. In 2016 PIL ended its formal relationship with the Information School.
Work
PIL's studies have been conducted using small teams of researchers drawn from libraries and schools of library and information science across the United States. To date, 20,987 early adults have participated in PIL studies. The institutional sample for PIL studies consists of 93 public and private colleges, universities, and community colleges, as well as 34 high schools located in the U.S. A 2016 study included data from Canadian institutions.
PIL has worked with members of a sample of 260 institutions. Partners include four-year private and public universities and colleges in the U.S. including Harvard College, The Ohio State University, University of Texas at Austin, University of Michigan, The University of Washington, DePaul University, Oklahoma State University, University of Alaska, Wellesley College and numerous community colleges. Each PIL study undergoes ethical review at the participating institutions and at the host institution where the study is based. (p. 80) Studies use a mixed-methods approach. PIL has conducted student surveys, focus groups, content analysis of research handouts, extensive interviews, and computational analysis of social media interactions. Final reports include summaries of key findings, in-depth data, and recommendations. All reports are Open Access, available from the PIL website at no charge.
PIL has produced 12 major research reports, investigating the experiences of college students and recent graduates as they interact with information for school, for life, for work, and most recently, for engaging with the news. On October 12, 2022, PIL published a retrospective report that summarized all 12 reports from the College Study, documented their impact, and included lessons learned from 14 years of research. In 2020, a PIL team released a two-part series on COVID-19 and the first 100 days of U.S. news coverage, which included interactive information visualizations and extensive set of learning resources for promoting news literacy. Researchers used MediaCloud to pull out and analyze the "shape of news" (I love that concept) and how it was visually represented through images." In 2019, PIL examined the awareness and concerns of college students in the age of algorithms, and released the report in January, 2020. The study was supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Electronic Research and Libraries (ER&L), a leading library conference, and the School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Carolina. This publication won the 2020 Ilene F. Rockman Instruction Publication of the Year, bestowed by The Association of College and Research Libraries. In October 2018, PIL released the findings of a study of students' news engagement practices in the "post-truth" era, sponsored by the Knight Foundation and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), a division of the American Library Association. Another project, The Reading List for Life, leverages PIL's research findings to develop a web application for adult learners in public libraries, and is a collaboration between PIL, The Open Syllabus Project at Columbia University, and the [email protected] 2016, PIL published a study, funded by the Information School at The University of Washington, that examined library spaces and included data from interviews with architects and library leaders.