Library Anxiety and library Anxiety Scale in the Digital Library Environment

As affective barriers to library and information use, library anxiety(Mellon, 1986) has been studied in reference/information services and bibliographic instructions. The paper revisits Mellon`s theory of library anxiety and Bostick`s(1992) Library Anxiety Scale(LAS) in the digital library environment. In particular, this study attempts to address the inadequacy of the continued applications of LAS in the digital library environment, although the scale has been used unquestionably as the instrument measuring library anxiety. This contention was substantiated by three service trends in digital libraries(i.e., digital reference services, remote access, and transition from bibliographic instructions to information literacy) and by re-analyses of published library anxiety research papers in recent years. This study addresses the need for scale development that could measure anxieties of digital library users. It also suggests Information Literacy Anxiety Scale(ILAS) as a direction for the new scale.

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