This path-breaking 175-page report presents data on undergraduate views of the desirability and need for library science education, measuring interest in undergraduate courses and MLS education. The report also tracks the percentage of undergraduates who have ever worked in an academic, public or special library, with separate data for each type of library. The report also measures undergraduate interest in a myriad of library science subject areas with distinct data sets for interest in special collections, cataloguing and metadata, law/business librarianship, social science librarianship, hard sciences librarianship, digitization and preservation, library info technology, purchasing and management and other areas. The study is an important resource for anyone trying to develop or market courses, webinars, conferences and other library science education resources. Data is based on a survey of 1,566 undergraduates at 4-year colleges and universities in the USA.
Data in the report is presented in the aggregate and broken out by 18 variables including but not limited to gender, family or origin income level, SAT/ACT scores, college grades, sexual orientation, college major or intended major, college year of class standing, age, public/private school status, political convictions and many other useful variables. It enables report end users to hone in on exactly the type of student most interested in a particular field of library science.
Just a few of the report’s many findings are that:
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Women were twice as likely as men to indicate interest in pursuing some form of undergraduate library science education (4.59% vs. 2.21%).
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Overall, 2.17% of respondents indicated they were interested or highly interested in undergrad courses in cataloguing and metadata.
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Respondents from private colleges were somewhat more likely than those from public colleges to indicate they were interested or highly interested in courses in library information architecture (3.74% vs. 2.42%).
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Groups more likely to report having ever worked in an academic library include: respondents who grew up in major cities (7.76%) or small or medium sized cities (7.37%) or in the South (8.76%) or abroad (7.32%).