Barriers Discouraging Access to Libraries as Agents of Lifelong Learning

Lifelong learning has been a key policy area in the UK since the present Government came to power in 1997. From the beginning it put learning “at the heart of its ambition”, seeing it as essential to the future success of the nation (Department for Education and Employment, 1998).

The library is considered to be an essential learning resource in institutions of formal education and, in the case of the public library, is a learning resource in its own right, acting in addition to, and in place of, the formal education system (Batt, 1998). For this reason, any research into factors that prevent effective use of libraries is to be welcomed.

Dr Barbara Hull’s study of barriers to library use as agents of lifelong learning was funded by the Library and Information Commission in answer to their call on the “The value and impact of library and information services”. Barbara Hull is Subject Information Team Leader for Social Sciences at the University of Teeside, UK, and the research took place in 1999.

The aims of the research are expressed in different ways in the abstract, executive summary and the text itself. The abstract says the research was conducted to “check assumptions that some students in further and higher education experience barriers to accessing libraries as agents of lifelong learning”. The executive summary, on the other hand, says the study aims to explore both “the general perception of library services by the socially excluded” and “the perception of higher education students from ‘non‐traditional’ backgrounds, of the interface between themselves and libraries … ” In the text itself, we are told the research also aims to test the awareness of central government’s lifelong learning initiatives on the part of the socially excluded.

The initial stage of the research involved the setting up of student focus groups at a “new” university and two further education colleges in the north east, to identify issues. The resulting data were then used to inform a questionnaire covering general patterns of library use, use of specific services and opinions about staff, services, practicalities (e.g. heat and noise) and information retrieval skills. A total of 422 students in further education and 518 in higher education completed the questionnaire. Of these, 31 were interviewed.

Although the study says it is about barriers to library use in general, this is a little misleading, since the focus of the questionnaire survey is, apart from one question, entirely on the use of learning resource centres in further and higher education. Interviewees were, however, asked to comment on their experiences of using library services in general and this provides some data on attitudes to public libraries.

Some of the study’s findings will be of no surprise either to public or academic librarians. Barriers were perceived to include insufficiency in the provision of textbooks, IT workstations and staffing levels. Relationships were found between students’ perceptions about barriers and variables such as gender, social class, ethnic origin, previous occupation, previous experience of library use and access to a PC in the home. The study concludes that public library users are more likely to borrow from college learning resource centres and that social class is important as a predictor of both use and ownership of PCs. Some of these conclusions might be questioned. Proctor and Bartle (2001), for example, found that formal learners per se tended to be heavier library users than non‐learners and also were more likely to be PC users.

Although the study does not focus specifically on the socially excluded or those students from non‐traditional backgrounds, the results confirm that students with low literacy levels have particular problems using library services, although these are not spelled out.

The study collects some interesting and useful data but the interpretation of findings within the report itself is very limited. There are no chapter summaries and the “Conclusion and discussion” chapter is disappointing (less than 1,500 words). Support for results from the literature is lacking. There are chapter references, but only nine items are cited after the introductory background chapter.

As with many research projects digestion of results is a slow process and published papers are likely to throw a clearer light on the findings. A paper given at the University of Teeside’s Teaching and Learning Conference in January 2002, for example, points to some interesting additional conclusions not made explicit in the report. Amongst these are the tendency for students to overestimate their level of skills and the worrying fact that students of more limited “library” experience, often “do not know what they do not know”.

Academic librarians eager to discuss the study’s results might usefully wait for the publication of further papers. The report itself is available on the Web at http://www.tees.ac.uk/lis/research.cfm