DO YOU SUFFER FROM LIBRARY ANXIETY?

Gillian S. Gremmels still remembers the aha moment she had when, as a reference librarian at DePauw University in Indiana, she first read “Library Anxiety: A Grounded Theory and Its Development” by Constance A. Mellon in the March 1986 issue of College & Research Libraries.

“The resonance I felt when I read about library anxiety was powerful,” she wrote in the same journal nearly 30 years later. “[Y]es, I thought; this is what I’m seeing in my students, who seem overwhelmed by the library, in need of librarians’ help, yet reluctant to approach us.”

That term—library anxiety—is hardly a household name among students, but say it to a college librarian, and he or she will know exactly what you’re talking about. It’s the feeling that one’s research skills are inadequate and that those shortcomings should be hidden. In some students it’s manifested as an outright fear of libraries and the librarians who work there. To many librarians it’s a phenomenon as real as it is perplexing.

“Why would anyone think we are intimidating?” writes Michel C. Atlas. “What is intimidating about a master’s-prepared professional earning $35,000 a year?”

Librarians have been discussing the general phenomenon since at least the mid-to-late 1970s, says Ann Campion Riley, president of the Association of College & Research Libraries, but it was Mellon who first gave it a name three decades ago. Her original study was based on analysis of journal entries college students had been required by their instructors to keep during the research process. After reading the student diaries, Mellon concluded, “Seventy-five to 85 percent of students in each class described their initial response to the library in terms of fear or anxiety.”

“Terms like scary, overpowering, lost, helpless, confused, and fear of the unknown appeared over and over again,” Mellon wrote. One student admitted to feeling like a “lost child”; another said she was “lost in there and actually scared to death.”

According to Mellon, three general themes emerged: Students found their own library skills inadequate; they found their perceived shortcomings shameful; they feared seeking out help would only reveal their inadequacy.

So where does this all leave the student who’s still fearful of making that first approach to the reference desk? Librarian Michel C. Atlas has some age-old, conventional wisdom to offer: “[T]he bottom line on library anxiety—just get over it!”

To read the complete article, see:
DO YOU SUFFER FROM LIBRARY ANXIETY? (http://daily.jstor.org/do-you-suffer-from-library-anxiety/)

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