For a few years, changes in the fields of information and communication have compelled the librarians to reconsider not only their practices but also those of the users of information systems. Dœs the cyberspace make it easier or not to get to information ? Dœs it alter the ways of learning ? Dœs it increase the possibility of mutual understanding ? And in front of this evolution what shoud the librarians do to help those who whish to acquire auto-informative competence ?Since the eighties training courses to STI have been organised in French higher education. However the assesment of these training classes imperils their very existence and gives rise to new questions linked -among other things- to the lack of partnership with universities and the difficult coordination offered essentially in the first two years of higher education. Besides, do such courses really enable students to take in hand their own capacities to information ? Can learners be helped to train and inform themselves within school or university structures ? And isn't paradoxical to hope to organise the emergence of a strudent's self directed learning ? The experiments carried out in France on autonomous work in secondary education in the seventies and the eighties partly failed as they challenged the functioning of the institution and made it necessary for teachers to operate a complete change of attitude.As we analyze the research work of two PhD students specialized in two different fields - that of sciences and that of human sciences- we show how, according to the advancement of their work, they both interact with interlocutors from different horizons to get information and train themselves. The analysis of the informative and cognitive operations organized between the young research students and their environnement highlights the importance of context in the process of their production and makes it possible to observe the part played by each person involved in their training. The findings of this study lead us to put forward another approch to the training of students. If the traditional transmission of knowledge was done away with, it would become possible to encourage the student to learn how to get informed, to train and develop as life gœs on.
