A new study overturns the common assumption that the ‘Google Generation' – youngsters born or brought up in the Internet age - is the most web-literate. The first ever virtual longitudinal study carried out by the CIBER research team at University College London claims that, although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the web.

This study was commissioned by the British Library and JISC to identify how the specialist researchers of the future, currently in their school or pre-school years, are likely to access and interact with digital resources in five to ten years’ time. This is to help library and information services to anticipate and react to any new or emerging behaviours in the most effective way. In this report, we define the `Google generation’ as those born after 1993 and explore the world of a cohort of young people with little or no recollection of life before the web. The broad aims of the study are to gather and assess the available evidence to establish:

• whether or not, as a result of the digital transition and the vast range of information resources being digitally created, young people, the `Google generation’, are searching for and researching content in new ways and whether this is likely to shape their future behaviour as mature researchers?
• whether or not new ways of researching content will prove to be any different from the ways that existing researchers and scholars carry out their work?
• to inform and stimulate discussion about the future of libraries in the internet era

These questions are of enormous strategic importance but they need to be balanced against considerable media hype surrounding the `Google generation’ phenomenon, so a healthy degree of critical distance is needed. A bewildering array of titles has attached itself to a younger generation that is growing up in an internetdominated, media-rich culture: Net Generation, Digital Natives, Millennials and many others. The untested assumption is that this generation is somehow qualitatively `different’ from what went before: that they have different aptitudes, attitudes, expectations and even different communication and information ‘literacies’ and that these will somehow transfer to their use of libraries and information services as they enter higher education and research careers.