Memory Skills: Whose Concern?

Educators are now concerned that modern generations of students are not yet prepared with the memory skills for processing aural and visual information, let alone the information contained in books. Research on various memory skills when tried with various media may reveal effective ways to transfer not only fleeting aural and visual information but the time-honored printed word as well. The question is, "Which strategies are the most effective in processing which media? " Since a great deal of memorizing takes place in libraries, librarians are in a good posi-tion to study this question and, perhaps, to contribute to what little is known about the effec-tiveness of individual memory strategies during the transfer process. The author suggests that librarians extend their interests beyond material and electronic processing to include the proc-essing of information in human memory. ho should be undertaking sci-entific research on memory skills? First of all, who might be helped by the results of such re-search? Students and professional