Survey of American College Students 2022: Interest in Library Science

Survey of American College Students 2022: Interest in Library Science

Women tend to be more interested than men; more than 3.8% of women but only 2.9% of men were either interested or highly interested and nearly four times as many women as men were highly interested. Broken out by race or ethnicity, this field drew the most interest from those of a mixed race background and nearly 7.5% of mixed race students were either interested or highly interested. Interest is also considerably higher among students at public than private colleges; about 4.3% of students at the former but only 2.8% of students at the latter were interested or highly interested in this field.This report, based on data from a representative survey of 1,765 full time college students at 4-year colleges in the USA, looks closely at the demographics of undergraduate student interest in many facets of library science.  Data is given specifically for interest in legal and corporate information literacy, information literacy in the hard sciences, social science info literacy, digital image management, special collections and digitization, cataloging and metadata, information purchasing management, and information architecture.  The demographics of student interest often differs significantly by field of library science – and this report is a superb guide for those trying to develop courses and degree programs in library science or trying to integrate library science into other programs.

The report also gives detailed data on the demographics of students who have ever worked in a colleges library and, separately, for special and public libraries – enabling the report’s readers target students with library experience and skills.