Barry Trott, Editor
Julie Elliott, Guest Columnist
Print version (Adobe Reader required)
In her 2007 column “Academic Libraries and Extracurricular Reading Promotion” (RUSQ 46:3), Julie Elliott looked at the history of Readers’ Advisory (RA) and extracurricular reading in academic libraries, and made a cogent argument for the reintegration of readers’ services into academic libraries. In the following column, she expands on this concept, exploring some of the barriers that are faced in offering or expanding RA services in colleges and universities. As in her earlier article, Elliott surveys practitioners in academic institutions where RA is not currently practiced in any focused fashion. She outlines the issues surrounding establishment of leisure reading promotion and makes suggestions for ways to take advantage of existing collections as well as to work collaboratively to expand the opportunities for promoting and supporting extracurricular reading among college and university students.
Elliott organizes the One Book, One Campus events at Indiana University–South Bend as well as the library’s speaker series. She is an active participant in the promotion of RA services, and she serves on RUSA’s Collection Development and Evaluation Section (RUSA CODES) Readers’ Advisory Committee. Elliott also edits the “By the Book” column for Public Libraries and currently serves on ALA’s Notable Books Council.—Editor
While I noted in my earlier article, “Academic Libraries and Extracurricular Reading Promotion,” (RUSQ 46:3), that many colleges are finding ways to promote reading to their students, many students are not taking advantage of these services. A study by the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) found that 65 percent of college freshmen spend less than an hour a week on leisure reading, and by the time they are seniors, one in three of them will do no leisure reading at all.1 The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2007 American Time Use Survey found that, on weekends, people aged 15 to 19 spent approximately 16 minutes reading for pleasure. Adults aged 20 to 24 spend approximately 7 minutes on the weekend doing leisure reading.2 This is a significant drop from the 2006 survey, where adults aged 20 to 24 were spending 14 minutes reading for pleasure during the weekends.3
With new technologies creating myriad ways for young adults to get their information, why should reading books outside of their curriculum matter at all? One reason is that literacy rates for college students are on the decline. A 2005 survey done by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) found that the average prose literacy scores for adults with bachelor’s degrees had dropped 11 points since 1992; adults with graduate degrees fared worse, dropping 13 points. Prose literacy is defined as “[t]he knowledge and skills needed to perform prose tasks (i.e., to search, comprehend, and use information from continuous texts).”4 The same survey found that only 31 percent of current college graduates could be considered “proficient” in reading prose, and only 41 percent of those with graduate degrees would be considered “proficient.”5 Being “proficient” in reading prose meant that a person could “compare viewpoints in two editorials.”6 Furthermore, 3 percent of college graduates in 2003 were considered to have “below basic” skills in prose literacy.7
Colleges should be concerned with declining literacy among their graduates because college graduates who are considered “proficient” in prose literacy are more likely to be employed than those who have only basic literacy skills.8 In addition, a study by the NEA found that active readers are more likely to vote and to volunteer in their community.9
Every college wants to graduate students who are proficiently literate, can successfully gain employment, and are civically engaged. It should be noted that there are barriers that can keep college libraries from adding extracurricular reading promotion to their already lengthy list of priorities. It should also be noted that students did not develop reading and literacy issues through coming to college, but because of problems throughout the U.S. K–12 education system. No college library director or dean is going to tell you that they want to graduate students who cannot compare and contrast two newspaper editorials, even if they do not believe that leisure reading promotion is the answer. Many academic library directors and deans interviewed in this article would like to promote leisure reading, but other realities intrude. This article will discuss the reasons academic library directors and deans are sometimes unable to promote extracurricular reading to their students, provide suggestions for ways that public libraries could reach out to their local college libraries, and examine potential future areas of research on the subject.
The Survey
A survey of ten questions was created on SurveyMonkey, and an invitation to library deans and directors whose libraries do not promote extracurricular reading was sent to the Collib-L and Libadmin-L discussion lists. Directors and deans of the 111 academic libraries belonging to the Association of Research Libraries received e-mails asking them to participate in the survey if their library did not promote extracurricular reading promotion. Thirty-eight people answered the survey, but not all answered every question. The survey was confidential, with certain questions allowing for further comment. If participants agreed to be contacted for further questions, they consented to be quoted (see appendix B, “Further Interview Questions to Deans and Directors”). See the full results of the survey. The text of the survey and study information can be found in appendix A.
There were some potential flaws with the survey and survey invitation. The fact that the title of the survey was “Barriers to Extracurricular Reading Promotion in Academic Libraries” turned away some potential respondents, who communicated to me that they would not take a survey that implied something negative. The fact that the survey questions asked why the libraries were not doing something also may have turned away many potential respondents, as sixty-seven people started the survey by answering question 1 (“Have you read the form and agree to take the survey?”), but thirty of those respondents did not go on to answer question 2. Rephrasing some survey questions could lead to a larger number of results. Question 2 included a definition of extracurricular reading promotion that may have led some potential respondents to abandon the survey if they found their libraries’ activities fit the definition. In future research, that definition will be included in the survey invitation. While starting with a smaller number of potential respondents than in my previous survey (Library Directors and Deans Who do not do Academic Reading Promotion in their Libraries Versus Any Academic Librarian), the number of respondents is disappointing—unless of course it means that more libraries are doing extracurricular reading promotion than in the past.
Barriers to Extracurricular Reading Promotion
The main reason cited for not doing extracurricular reading promotion was budget issues, with 70 percent responding that it was an issue and 31 percent noting that it was the number one issue impeding reading promotion. One survey respondent stated:
My library does not have sufficient funding to acquire everything we should to support teaching, learning, and research. I would not be a good manager of my budget if I used some of my insufficient funding to acquire materials that are available at the public library.
Staff issues were another reason cited, with 65 percent listing it as an issue, and 25 percent citing it as the main issue. From the anonymous comments, there appear to be two types of staff issues: a lack of staff and a lack of interest from staff. “All decreases in services and services never delivered [are] nearly always about staff downsizing, of which there appears no end,” one respondent replied. “I would be willing to support activities of this type, but nothing all that creative has been suggested by library faculty/staff,” wrote another respondent. One potential solution to both types of staffing problems is the use of volunteers, though there are challenges here as well. “It is hard to find staff time to put toward this with being understaffed already and we have tried unsuccessfully for years to find volunteers to do things such as this,” one respondent wrote.
Somewhere in the article the idea is mentioned that we may need to go to the students to assess what would cause them to engage in extracurricular reading. That seems to me a good way to understand the situation and determine an appropriate response. To understand the librarians’ position is a piece, but only a piece, and, I would suggest, not the most important one. There are many variables that could be influencing the situation, and we can’t assume which hold the most weight–that is merely a hypothesis. The questions have to be answered with research.
A starting point would be to survey students. The article suggests that a student’s history, that is their habits, education, etc. previous to entering college, may be a larger contributing factor to some of the mentioned patterns (e.g. declining prose proficiency) than the time spent during college. How can you know until you collect data and start testing variables for significance?
Interestingly enough, the responses of the interviewees shows how opinions are divided. A couple don’t believe this should ever be an issue to be addressed by academic librarians. Maybe they are right, but we’ll never know until we uncover all the aspects… if it is deemed worth it to someone.