Filtering and organizing information

This is my first post to the Re: Generations blog, so if I look a little furtive it's just because I don't quite have my bearings yet. At my own blog I tend to post small snippets rather than thoughtful pieces, but I'll try to wax a little longer here. (Many thanks to the Re: Generations team for letting me jump on board!)

I've been working on a research project that involves asking students and faculty about library resources and services within the campus CMS--i.e., Blackboard, WebCT, or, in our case here at Berkeley, Sakai. One byproduct of this is that people tend to tell me what their most pressing research needs are. So far, I'm seeing that most researchers have two very pressing needs: filtering information, and organizing it.

This is a big paradigm shift for libraries and librarians, I think. Senior librarians, who entered the profession twenty or thirty years ago, may remember a time when information was much more difficult to come by. There was no Google, no Internet, no email, no constant partial attention. There were paper indexes, card catalogs, and closed stacks. Twenty or thirty years ago, the most pressing need of most researchers may have been to find information at all--to tease it out of the libraries and archives of the world, with the help of skilled professionals.

I sometimes think we haven't really internalized this shift, as a profession. And it's true that many of us still support researchers who came of age during that paper-bound period. Those researchers may prefer hard copies, avoid email, and rely on non-digital research methods that keep their overall information intake down to a dull roar. But it's clear to me that the tide is turning for everyone.

This brings me to a very concrete consideration: are librarians teaching information-filtering and -organization skills to students? I think many of us teach some of these skills implicitly, every time we show students how to search in MLA or ATLA or BIOSIS. We teach students how to read citations (a vital survival skill for the information world.) We teach them how to sort search results. Above all, we teach them how to do a good search in the first place, so they get relevant results with a minimum of noise.

But maybe we can also teach a few other things. I've been surprised at how few students know what RSS feeds are, much less how to manage them. Still fewer know that Zotero is free, open-source, and can be downloaded to a USB drive for use with Portable Firefox. ("Portable what?") Instant citation organization! What a time-saver!

I'm wondering what tools other folks are using for information filtering and organization, and how we're teaching these skills and resources to our students.

Any thoughts?