Education Commons^™

Teaching Anxious Students Skills For The Electronic Library, Beth Mark, Trudi E. Jacobson

Library Staff Presentations & Publications

Some students immediately feel at home in today's technology-saturated library, but many others have difficulty navigating the myriad of electronic sources in most academic libraries. It is estimated that as many as one-third of the college students in the United States suffer from technophobia and are anxious about using computers. In addition to coping with computer technology, many first-year college students are intimidated by the size and complexity of academic libraries (Mellon 1986). In short, just when students most need to become competent users of information technology, anxieties can cause them to avoid the library altogether (Warmkessel 1992).

Breaking the …