The informed engineer

Future engineers need an education program that can provide them with the breadth of knowledge necessary to be knowledgeable and productive contributors to both the workplace and to society. In short, engineers need information. Unfortunately, most technical science courses don´t require assignments that involve information research. It is even more unfortunate, that due the heavy technical nature of their curriculum, students are often only exposed to these information retrieval skills a few times in their college career. The Association of College & Research Libraries and the American Association for Higher Education endorsed Information Literacy Competency Standards for higher education to describe essential skills that a student should possess to effectively identify the need for and utilize information. These standards correlate with several of the ABET evaluation criteria. This paper both examines these relationships and explores the need for engineering students to master information competencies.