Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

M.A.—$20,000 dollars of student debt, 14 months, one thesis, two internships, $1,500 dollars worth of textbooks, and countless sleepless nights later and I finally earned those two little letters following my name.

It wasn’t until three semesters into my degree, after spending $1,000 dollars merely renting my textbooks that I discovered my University’s ebook library. To be clear, I didn’t just stumble upon it either. After learning about open educational resources (OER) at the HEeD Think Tank last spring (now UPCEA’s eDesign Collaborative), I spent hours doing my own personal research on my university’s open access policy and scouring the library website. Eventually, I was able to find all but three of my 11 textbooks for my master’s degree in educational technology freely available on the library website, not to mention plenty of other materials (e.g., case studies and articles I had purchased over the years).

There is currently a dearth of research on African American college students and their interactions in academic libraries. The purpose of this quantitative study is to investigate whether African American college students view academic libraries as welcoming places and to identify factors that are most influential in their perceptions of welcomeness. Adopting the theoretical lens of “library in the life of the user,” we administered a national online survey questionnaire to 160 black college students attending non-historically black colleges and universities in the United States. The survey data were analyzed by employing correlation coefficient and multiple regression analysis to test our hypotheses. The analytical results showed that participants felt welcomed in academic libraries, and library as place and information needs were significant factors that affected students’ perceptions of welcomeness. Our findings suggest that library patrons are important actors in constituting the atmospheric character of the library.