Library Assignments: Challenges that Students Face and How to Help

any undergraduate college stu dents perennially dread library or research assignments, re garding them as either unrequited drudgery or a source of unrewarding anx iety. I would like to discuss the challenges that students face when grappling with a research assignment, provide examples of situation and design problems, and offer some solutions. Using the library productively and re searching efficiently are less intuitive and more complicated tasks than they might appear. Effective library assignments are difficult to create, and most students (indeed, most researchers) are dedicated to the Principle of Least Effort, also called the Principle of Information-Pro cessing Parsimony, documented by Thomas Mann (1993, 91):