Alison Head Executive Director, Project Information Literacy
She is the founder and executive director of Project Information Literacy (PIL), a research institute that studies what it is like to be a student in the digital age. In a series of 10 groundbreaking research studies, PIL has investigated how college students and recent graduates utilize research skills, competencies, and strategies for completing course work and for solving information problems in everyday life. Since 2008, more than 22,000 students have participated in PIL studies. The institutional sample for PIL studies has consisted of 89 public and private colleges and universities and community colleges located in the U.S. In 2016 Inside Higher Education column, Barbara Fister called PIL "hands-down the most important long-term, multi-institutional research project ever launched on how students use information for school and beyond." Alison has a Ph.D. in library and information science from the University of California at Berkeley where she also received her BA. She is a Senior Researcher at the metaLAB at Harvard University and a Visiting Research Scholar at University of Pittsburgh. In 2017, she was awarded the inaugural S. T. Lectureship in Library Leadership and Innovation from Harvard Library. From 2011 through 2015, Alison was a Fellow and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Her research about today’s students and their information practices began with a small study at Saint Mary's College of California, where she taught new media as the Roy O. Disney Visiting Professor in New Media for 10 years. More about Dr. Head's research and PIL is available at: http://projectinfolit.org/