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The prevalence of library anxiety among college students has been acknowledged by librarians and educators for over a decade. However, there are still people who question whether library anxiety is a real phenomenon. The importance of library anxiety among graduate students is particularly challenged. This study examined the relationship between library anxiety and trait anxiety of 115 graduate students in the United States. Findings revealed that trait anxiety was not significantly related to any of the five dimensions of library anxiety, suggesting that library anxiety is a unique, independent phenomenon. Therefore, library anxiety should be taken seriously. An action‐research approach to addressing library anxiety was recommended.

The relationship between seven dimensions of self‐perception and five dimensions of library anxiety was studied using canonical correlation analyses. Participants were 148 students enrolled in graduate‐level research methodology courses. The first canonical function revealed that students with the lowest level of self‐perception associated with perceived scholastic competence, perceived intellectual ability, perceived creativity, and perceived social acceptance tended to have the highest level of library anxiety related to affective barriers and comfort with the library. A comparison of the standardized and structure coefficients suggested that perceived self‐worth, barriers with staff, and mechanical barriers served as suppressor variables that assisted in the prediction of library anxiety. Implications of the findings are discussed.

This study compared the five subscale scores and total scale scores of the Library Anxiety Scale from 135 Caucasian‐American and 45 African‐American graduate students. Findings indicated that the Caucasian‐American sample reported significantly higher levels of library anxiety associated with three of the five subscales than did the African‐American sample. A canonical discriminant analysis also revealed significant differences between the two racial groups, with Caucasian‐American graduate students reporting significantly higher levels of library anxiety associated with the same three subscales than their African‐American counterparts. These findings suggest that race appears to be a predictor of library anxiety levels. The implications of the findings on academic library services and future research are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent that cooperative group members' levels of library anxiety, operationalized as barriers with staff, affective barriers, comfort with the library, knowledge of the library and mechanical barriers, predict: group performance, namely, the quality of an article critique assignment and research proposal assignment; and the degree that heterogeneity (namely, variability of the five library anxiety dimensions) is related to this outcome variable.

Participants were 107 postgraduate students enrolled in a research methodology course at a mid‐southern university in the USA. Groups (n = 1) formed the unit of analysis. An all possible subsets multiple regression analysis was used to identify an optimal combination of library anxiety variables that predicted the group performance score.

It was found that cooperative learning groups attaining the lowest scores on the article critique and research proposal assignments combined tended to report the least variation with respect to barriers with staff and knowledge of the library, and the greatest variation with respect to affective barriers. These variables explained 41.8 per cent of the variance in performance, suggesting that library anxiety plays a role in the cooperative learning group process.

This study is based on a relatively small sample of postgraduate students from one university. Replications of this study with larger samples from different universities are needed to help validate the findings.

The findings may help academic librarians and educators who work with postgraduate or adult students better understand the debilitating effects of library anxiety on these students' academic performance.

To date, no research has investigated levels of library anxiety on the performance of cooperative learning groups.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the status of library anxiety, which has received relatively little research attention in Pakistan, and its relationship with library use, academic performance (grade point average), gender and academic discipline among the undergraduate students.

Data were collected using a questionnaire from 725 fourth year undergraduate students of three different disciplines from three universities. The participation was voluntary. The data were processed using SPSS version 20.

A majority of the respondents (72.1 per cent) experienced a mild library anxiety. The factors: user education and user knowledge were the greatest sources of library anxiety. Findings revealed differences in library anxiety on the basis of gender and academic discipline. Library anxiety and academic performance had a significant negative relationship with each other.

This is the first study in Pakistan that addressed library anxiety and its relationship with library use, academic discipline and academic performance using a large group (N = 725) of undergraduate students.

This paper aims to explore the use of Bostick’s (1992) Library Anxiety Scale (LAS) in a developing country perspective to find out the level of anxiety among university students and to identify the underlying factors that contribute to this phenomenon.

A slightly modified 43-item LAS was used to collect data from 350 students at Dhaka University. For data analysis, negatively worded statements were reverse-scored so that all the statements are scored in the same direction. The statistical significance is measured using Mann–Whitney (M-W) and Kruskal–Wallis (K-W) tests. The M-W tests were conducted to examine the differences in students’ library anxiety scores in terms of their age and educational levels. The K-W tests were conducted to examine the differences in students’ ratings on LAS items in terms of their age and faculty enrolment. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted on the survey data to examine the factors contributing to students’ anxiety. Finally, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to test the convergent validity of the measures chosen to represent each factor construct.

The result of this study indicated that library anxiety exists amongst Dhaka University students, as most LAS scores fell above 3 on a 5-point Likert scale. The individual differences in terms of gender, age, educational level and frequency of library visit were not significant for most of the items. The EFA, after several iterations, yielded a five-factor solution for library anxiety constructs although only two factors were found to have met the required reliability scores. The CFA, however, failed to produce any meaningful results. This paper made several recommendations to the university library administration to alleviate the problems that appear to have triggered library anxiety.

This is a pioneering study of the use of Bostick’s LAS in Bangladesh. It is hoped that the findings of this study will encourage researchers to develop anxiety scales which would address the need for library services in developing country context.

This paper reviews the major publications by Qun G. Jiao and Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie that chronicles the development of empirical research conducted on the construct of library anxiety among college students in the United States during the past decade. It also examines the sizeable contribution that these two researchers have made to the body of knowledge of this emerging field of study in library and information science. The paper concludes by encouraging more researchers to continue the work of Jiao and Onwuegbuzie by examining further this widespread and pervasive phenomenon.

Library anxiety is a phenomenon that is different from other academic anxiety, which has implication on physical use of libraries. This study aims to investigate the phenomenon of library anxiety among undergraduates in federal universities in North-central, Nigeria.

Descriptive survey of the correlational type was adopted for the study. Purposive sampling technique was used in selecting five conventional federal universities, three homogenous faculties and six departments through multistage sampling technique. Five percent of the undergraduates (797) were selected from a total sample of 15,933. The instrument used was measuring scale on library anxiety (MSLA) developed by Bostick (1992). Descriptive statistics such as percentage mean and standard deviation were used to analyse the research questions.

The findings revealed that majority of the undergraduates (85.0%) experienced moderate level of library anxiety across the universities at varying degree. The most prevalent aspect of the library anxiety experienced by the undergraduates was inadequate knowledge of the library (x. = 2.14).

The study selected five conventional universities out of the seven federal universities in North-central, Nigeria.

Based on the findings, the study recommends library orientation programme for the undergraduates to increase their knowledge of the library. Likewise, the library staff should be more approachable and friendly so as to alleviate the library anxiety experienced by the undergraduates.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship of information-seeking anxiety (ISA) with socio-academic variables of business students in the digital environment.

A cross-sectional survey using a questionnaire was conducted. The questionnaire, composed of 47 items of Information Seeking Anxiety Scale along with certain socio-academic variables, was administered personally among business students by visiting their classrooms at the Lahore School of Economics, Pakistan. The received 283 responses were analyzed by applying descriptive and inferential statistics such as mean, standard deviation, t-test and one-way analysis of variance.

The results revealed that a large majority of business students were less comfortable in information seeking and experienced anxiety from mild to moderate levels. There were only a few respondents who faced either low or severe levels of ISA. In relationship testing, the students’ socio-academic variables such as program type, gender, school background, geographical background, information communication technology skills and English language competence did not appear to be the predictors of their ISA.

The results of this study should carefully be used while making generalizations for all the business students in Pakistan and abroad as this research collected data from the business students of a single university in Pakistan.

These results have greater implications for the future directions of information literacy as creating awareness and building capacity for skills about the information search process will help in reducing ISA. These findings provided a pragmatic insight that can be used as a guide by information professionals, especially those engaged in information services, to develop a need-based curriculum of information literacy which would ultimately help in the alleviation of anxiety and combating its effects on students’ academic performance.

This study address specifically ISA of business students that would make a worthy contribution to the existing research on ISA as, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no such study has appeared so far.

The present study examined the relationship between library anxiety and social interdependence. Participants were 115 graduate students from various disciplines who were administered the Library Anxiety Scale (LAS) and the Social Interdependence Scale (SIS). The LAS assesses levels of library anxiety. The SIS measures individuals’ cooperative, competitive, and individualistic perceptions. The higher the score on each of the three SIS subscales, the more cooperative, the more competitive, or the more individualistic the respondents consider themselves to be. Scores on these scales are relatively independent so that a student could conceivably receive a high score on all three scales. A canonical correlation analysis (R_c = 0.41) revealed that cooperative attitudes were related significantly to barriers with staff, comfort with the library, and knowledge of the library. Individualistic attitudes, affective barriers, and mechanical barriers served as suppressor variables. Implications are discussed.