Measuring the Importance of Library User Education: A Comparative Study Between Fudan University and the National Taiwan Normal University

This study aims at examining students' attitudes and perceptions towards the values and importance of the user education program provided by the libraries of two leading universities in Asia - namely, Fudan University (FU), located in Shanghai and the National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU), located in Taipei. It uses a comparative approach to highlight the differences in students' feelings about a series of user education programs carried out by these two academic libraries. The data was collected through online questionnaire surveys with student participants, together with a small number of face-to-face interviews with the user education librarians to reflect on the survey results. A total number of 109 survey responses were collected from both universities. Results of this study indicated that a majority of the student respondents considered library user education as an important part of their formal academic learning - as such library programs enabled them the necessary skills to make the best and maximum use the library resources available. The findings of this study are useful for identifying the different learning needs amongst these two groups of students, as well as other barriers that were preventing the library user education programs to be integrated into students' overall learning, and the university's core curriculum as a whole.