Information Anxiety and African-American Students in a Graduate Education Program

Abstract

Library anxiety has been cited as one factor affecting academic performance, but library use is only part of obtaining information for academic needs. This paper expands the concept of library anxiety to information anxiety by an examination of the information behavior of black graduate students when using a variety of information resources, including electronic and human. Findings indicate that information anxiety is a continuous element of minority students’ information behavior and creates a barrier to obtaining and using information for academic work.