This major study of how American college students use their academic libraries presents data from a representative sample of 1,100 college students attending 4-year colleges in the United States. The report gives highly detailed demographic data on in-library use of many different kinds of library resources including but not limited to: public workstations, technology lending programs for laptops, tablets and other resources, 3D printers, group study rooms, information literacy classes, specialized technology rooms and commons, DVD’s and videos, eBook collections and much more.
Data in the report is presented in the aggregate and then broken out separately for seventeen different variables including but not limited to: college grades, gender, income level, year of college standing, SAT/ACT scores, regional origin, age, sexual orientation, college major and other personal variables, and by Carnegie class, enrollment size and public/private status of the survey participants institutions of higher education.
Just a few of the 140-page report’s many findings are that:
-
Use of eBook collections increased with age. Only 28.93% of those 19 years old or younger had used the eBook collection in the past month vs. 38.41% of those aged 22.
-
In general, larger colleges and universities in terms of enrollment were more likely than their smaller counterparts to harbor students who only rarely or never visited the library and about 43% of students at colleges with more than 16,500 enrolled students visited the library once a month or less frequently.
-
Use of items put on library reserve in the past month was much higher at private than public colleges; reserves were used by 18.35% of students at the former but almost half this, 9.94% at the latter.
-
Students majoring in in business and finance and in social sciences were the most likely to have used a library group study room in the past month – about 46.5% in both cases; students in fine and performing arts were the least likely – only 32.47%.