Information literacy among the students in the electronic environment: A case study of Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar

The present study explores the status of information literacy skills of students of Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, their information seeking strategies and ability in acquiring, organizing, evaluating and using the information effectively. A well structured questionnaire was designed to collect data for the present study. Personal interviews were conducted to fill in the gaps if any in the questionnaire. Collected data was analyzed with the help of SPSS. The major findings of the study are that a majority of the respondents possess knowledge of MS-office, social networking sites and e-mail. Among six types of internet searching tools, search engines and wiki are the most common, while blogs, online bibliographic databases and subject gateways/portals are less frequent. On the basis of the findings, some suggestions have been put forward to improve the information literacy skills of the students.