Technology education in academic libraries: An analysis of library workshops

Abstract

Learning new technology is essential for students and scholars in higher education to engage in learning and research of today. Previous studies have reported various barriers to technology acceptance and application in academic communities. To foster active engagement in technology-enhanced research and learning, academic libraries could serve as a technology hub for their communities. Many researchers have already explored the role of academic libraries in promoting information literacy as well as digital and data literacy. However, technology education in library instruction, which helps students and scholars develop such literacies, has not been a major topic in the existing literature. Even when studies deal with technology related content, their topics of instruction concentrate largely on data science skills and tools. The existing literature does not capture a comprehensive landscape of what instructional support the academic libraries provide in terms of technology skills and tools, including but not limited to data science techniques.The goal of this study is to present an overview of academic library instruction for technology education for their communities. This study examines library workshops offered by 43 four-year college libraries in the US. The titles and descriptions of the workshops were manually collected and analyzed to understand the content of library instruction using both quantitative and qualitative analysis methods. The findings of this study suggest that American academic libraries play an important role in educating their patrons a wide range of technology for their academic success in technology-mediated learning and research environments. They teach various technologies for research, teaching and learning, career support, conventional library instruction, and many other purposes. We found that academic libraries teach not only popular and common tools, but also specialized and unique tools for certain fields.