Fullerton, California--College students use technology constantly. They text-message friends, compile playlists for their iPods, and are whizzes at updating their MySpace profiles. But when it comes to one kind of work they are required to do in college--namely, academic research--they can be inept. Too often, college officials say, students rely on Google or Wikipedia as sources, as if oblivious to peer-reviewed scholarship. The explosion of electronic information is fueling students' confusion, librarians say. In 1996 there were 10,000 scholarly databases online; now they exceed 18,000. The Web is teeming with more than 100 million sites, up from 18,000 in 1995. Google and Microsoft recently began archiving books and scholarly journals and making them available via their search engines. And two online, academic-oriented encyclopedias, Citizendium and Scholarpedia, are starting up, inspired by the success of Wikipedia, the open-source encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Furthermore, to encourage students to use scholarly material, professors at Cal State's Fullerton campus often send their students to a computer lab, where a librarian shows them how to navigate the university's online catalog of databases, scholarly books, and journals to do research in a particular discipline. Many journal articles can be viewed in full online, and material that the library does not have can be borrowed from another library with the click of a mouse, students are told. And that kind of instruction is occurring at colleges all over the country as part of "information literacy," a growing librarian-led movement to make students more adept at locating and evaluating electronic data.