Investigating Collaborative Information Seeking Practice of Design Engineering Students

Abstract

Design engineering projects are reliant on collaborative effort among multiple individuals and/or departments through sharing experiments and data and collaboration on analysis of data and results. Information literacy is one of the competencies that design engineering students are expected to acquire through these courses, given that fact that students with an undergraduate Engineering degree will be at the entry level as professional engineers, the skills and tools they learn through their education will be their success keys in their profession, but the question is what information practice skills and tools that the industry expects that our students have acquired during design engineering courses and what are the information practice skills that students need to learn to meet employers’ expectations?. This paper provides an overview of collaborative information practice and what role that librarians can do through the life cycle of a design engineering course.