A Study of Professional Growth Relative Readings of Colleges and Universities librarians

[[abstract]]In human history, the accumulation of knowledge is amazing, the major difference between human beings and other animals is that human knows how to preserve the culture through the use of text and absorb ancestor’s wisdom and knowledge through reading, and finally, turn them into personal knowledge. In the current international society, the quantity and quality of reading population in a country is one of the standards to evaluate the level of civilization of a country. In addition to building personal knowledge system, the library personnel can be the bridge between the reader and the book only when the library personnel themselves own the belief and concept of lifetime reading. The main purpose of the current study is to understand the related reading status regarding professional growth for colleges and universities librarians, we hope that through this study, the reading behavior such as the reading status, reading attitude and reading motive for colleges and universities librarians can be understood; we also hope to understand the relationship between reading behavior and related reading for the colleges and universities librarians. Library personnel in 159 universities and colleges are used as the target for studying the relationship between reading behavior and related reading for professional growth. Pilot interview and sampling questionnaire survey are going to be used as the research method, the effective survey questionnaire return rate is about 75.27％. The research result can be described in five parts: 1.Current reading status: The average daily reading time for library personnel in universities and colleges is about one hour, email and book are usually the reading targets and the reading of e-book has the lowest rate, meanwhile, leisure and life reading are the usual book types for reading and leisure spending is the major reason for reading. 2.Reading attitude: In the reading attitude aspect, except the obvious differences in “cognitive” and “emotion” due to different schools served, there are no obvious differences in other personal variable aspects. Reading time is affected by reading attitude and had obvious difference. 3.Reading motive: In the reading motive aspect of library personnel in universities and colleges, in addition to the difference in terms of school served, in other aspect such as “social aspects of reading” factor, library personnel with position higher than group leader are obviously higher than that of other personnel; in the “achievement values and goals” factor for married library personnel, it is higher than that of unmarried library personnel; there are no obvious differences in other personal variables. Reading time is affected by reading motive and had obvious difference. 4.Related reading for professional growth: For library personnel in universities and colleges, they have more reading and digestion on “knowledge type” than other types, moreover, it emphasizes on knowledge related to book informatics; however, in other personal background variable and sub-facet, library personnel with different school type served will have obvious difference in the related reading of “technical type” professional growth, and library personnel with longer working experiences spend very few time on reading related to “information technology type”; younger library personnel show superiority in reading related to “professional knowledge for information technology”, “information technology type”, however, in the reading related to “management and administration” and “service type”, the elder library personnel show superiority than younger personnel and had obvious difference; when male and female are compared, male shows higher reading in professional knowledge growth and there is no obvious difference reached in other variable. Therefore, from the result of the current research we know that there is still room to be improved in the related reading behavior for colleges and universities librarians. 5.Related analysis results: The study shows that there is a statistical obvious relationship between reading attitude and reading motive, and there is also an obvious statistical relationship between reading attitude and related reading regarding professional knowledge growth. However, if we take a look from the sub-facet, we find that there is no statistical relationship between the “emotion” of reading and related reading for professional growth. In addition, there is an obvious relationship between reading motive and related reading for professional growth, if we take a look from the sub-facet of reading motive, except that the “social aspects of reading” facet of reading motive and the “knowledge type” facet of related reading for professional growth do not reach obvious level, other facets such as the three facets of “competence and efficacy beliefs” and “achievement values and goals” of reading motive and the related reading for professional growth all reach obvious relationship; moreover, the “social aspects of reading” facet and the “technical type” and “serving type” facets of related reading regarding professional growth all reach obvious relationship. Finally, through the regression analysis, we find that reading motive has obvious predicting power on the related reading regarding professional growth.