There they were, 11 college students, lined up like some alien species before a curious group of about 50 college and university librarians.

One University of Minnesota student had a bagful of electronics with him: iPod, PalmPilot, cell phone. He was bright, opinionated, well-spoken.

And when was the last time he was in the U’s library?

“Last year,” he said.

The collective intake of breath nearly turned the room into a vacuum. What’s a university librarian to do with this generation of college students?

In one of the kickoff sessions of the national conference of the Association of College and Research Libraries, the group spent seven hours Thursday at the Minneapolis Convention Center puzzling over the habits of the so-called millennial generation.

Confident, sophisticated, tolerant and practical, they are “Internet natives” who are more likely to use Google to research a paper than go to the library.

Accustomed to getting information at the click of a mouse button, they are impatient with the slower, word-based searches and single-use computers that many libraries use.

One librarian said that at her college, students filled the large reading room but never approached the librarian behind the reference desk. When someone finally asked why, a student said, “I thought you were there to watch us.”

###

More in the link, obviously. Definitely something I think about every now and then, at least in the general sense of technology in everyday life. Carl will always have Sesame Street at his beck and call because of the TiVo, for instance, instead of having to wait patiently until it’s on. When I was a kid, it was a big deal if you typed your paper for school on a computer; now, it’s expected. And we’ve always been the generation that was comfortable with new technology — what about the generation that doesn’t know anything but the New?