Constance Mellon's "Library Anxiety": An Appreciation and a Critique

Gillian S. Gremmels is Library Director at Davidson College; e-mail: [email protected]. © 2015 Gillian S. Gremmels, Attribution-NonCommercial (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) CC BY-NC. Introduction Even after almost thirty years, I vividly remember reading Constance A. Mellon’s article, “Library Anxiety: A Grounded Theory and Its Development,” when it appeared in the March 1986 issue of College & Research Libraries.1 I was a reference librarian at DePauw University in Indiana at the time, helping students individually and in “bibliographic instruction” classes. The resonance I felt when I read about library anxiety was powerful: yes, I thought; this is what I’m seeing in my students, who seem overwhelmed by the library, in need of librarians’ help, yet reluctant to approach us. To have the phenomenon confirmed by research and given a name authenticated it and enabled my colleagues and me to address it directly with students and faculty. I was also intrigued by Mellon’s method. I had never heard of grounded theory before, but a method that based its conclusions on students’ own rich descriptions of their realities greatly appealed to me. A few years later, when I was studying naturalistic/interpretivist research methodology at Indiana University, I read Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss’s book, The Discovery of Grounded Theory, and did my own grounded theory study on choices made by academic reference librarians while working with students. 2 My experience evidently was not unique. Mellon’s article was chosen as one of the seven most important in the 75-year history of College & Research Libraries because it made “library anxiety,” a phenomenon observed by practitioners, official and uncovered its origins. The article also legitimized the use of qualitative research methods by giving grounded theory wide recognition in a premier journal. In this essay, I summarize Mellon’s method and findings, trace the article’s influence, offer a critique, and suggest some directions for future research.