In my early years as a high school librarian, I was troubled by the question, "So what?" Yes, I could help my students find information, but I was not interested in mindless copying or regurgitating. I learned that my "so what" was to teach my students to think, to follow their own curiosities, and to reach their own conclusions. I developed a research process, which later became an inquiry model, to frame teaching and learning for my students.

But my students and I were limited. I began as a librarian before computers became a mainstay in our libraries, before the Internet entered our lives. Yes, I know that's hard to believe. I still remember trying to help a student find information about the history of chocolate. He wanted to follow his own curiosity, but we could find no information about the history of chocolate in our library and we had no access to the broader world of information. If a student today wanted to research the history of chocolate, a whole new set of challenges emerges. A Google search yields 939,000 entries, ranging from vendor-sponsored (with opportunities to purchase chocolate in all forms) to Wikipedia to a Smithsonian article to a page posted by an ice cream company. And that is just the first page of results. Today's student is challenged to sift through the relevant and irrelevant, reliable and unreliable glut of information. The mandate for librarians today is to teach the essential analysis and evaluation skills and guide the student beyond mindless copying of information to asking intriguing questions and confronting interesting issues in their research (e.g., the ethical issues in the history of chocolate production).

When the digital environment started permeating school libraries, I began asking new questions about the impact of digital tools and resources on teaching and learning. In a 2014 book chapter called "Inquiry in the Digital Age," I tried to identify essential factors in teaching digital inquiry: reasons to frame learning around an inquiry model; the nature of digital resources; and the skills that librarians needed to teach, including evaluating sources and information, corroboration, multiple literacies, ethical participation, and drawing evidence-based conclusions (Stripling 2014).

Those factors still provide a good foundation for our thinking, but we have learned so much more in the last six years. Resources have changed significantly. Valuable sources are increasingly available and often freely accessible, like Open Educational Resources (OER) and primary sources from the National Archives, Library of Congress, and the Digital Public Library of America (Jaeger 2017, Lamb 2016). But students must be taught specific analysis skills to be able to gather information from primary sources. My own doctoral research showed that students must have context to be able to interpret primary sources. Digital archives of primary sources are usually presented without valuable historical, social, geographical, or any other context.

New types of digital information and new technology tools have compounded the challenges our students must confront when doing research online. Deborah Stanley, in Chapter 12 of her recently published book about digital research, identifies some resources and tools that present both challenges and opportunities: crowdsourced information, social media like Facebook and Twitter, virtual and augmented reality, and wikis (Stanley 2019).

We need to think deeply about how digital resources and tools can be effectively used to frame learning experiences and teach essential inquiry skills and attitudes. Can our students trust crowdsourced data? Can they separate fact from opinion from misinformation from propaganda in social media posts? How do they protect themselves from believing viral and baseless theories, from accepting the disinformation promulgated by altered photos, and from their own confirmation bias?

Our story of teaching digital inquiry is, of course, incomplete. As the world of information and technology changes, so must we change our role and the skills that we teach. Our students must learn specialized literacies like media literacy and transliteracy. They must learn to evaluate everything they read online for authority, accuracy, and bias. They must recognize the increasing challenges to ethical participation in our digital society.

Above all, we must recognize the "So what?" of teaching research and inquiry in the digital environment. Digital inquiry is authentic. We can enable students to push their learning beyond the boundaries of the school and the textbook curriculum, to pursue intriguing questions, and to answer for themselves the question of "What makes sense?" (Ellis 2018, Eichenlaub 2019). We can design authentic inquiry projects (Olson 2016). We can provide a path for students to develop their own voices and agency and participate productively in civic society (Gardner and Nam 2020).

Every one of us has developed strategies and examples of teaching research and inquiry in the digital age. I hope we can share our insights with each other. We can be confident that the "so what" of our story is empowering our students to write their own story.