Understanding the Global Problem of Technostress for Librarians

Abstract

Technostress is a workplace reality that pre-service librarians need to be prepared to face. Isolated studies have reported the causes and impacts of technostress on various types of librarians in different countries (e.g., Farler & Broady-Preston, 2012; Norulkamar, Ahmad & Amin, 2012). Responding to Lor’s (2019) call for international and comparative research, we take a global perspective, seeking commonalities and differences that may lead to global solutions and recommendations for professional education. The first phase of our project is a scoping review of studies of technostress and librarians. Using multiple LIS-related databases and Google Scholar, we compiled 260 papers tagged with the keywords technostress and librarian*. After reviewing the results, we confirmed that 92 of these papers meet the inclusion criteria of being about technostress and about librarians. We will add to this corpus by forward and backward chaining to identify studies that were not indexed in the databases we searched. Finally, we will analyze the results, focusing on country, type of library, and research method used. In addition, we will categorize studies using Nisafani, Kiely and Mahony’s (2020) conceptual model of technostress which includes causes, strains, inhibitors, and impacts.The poster format will provide an opportunity to visualize the results of the scoping review for creative insights. We plan to build on the first phase of the project, and the input from conference attendees, to design our further research.