Attitudes of Young Adults Towards Public Library Services: A Study

The present study provides a glimpse of the young adult public library (YAPL) users’ attitudes and their perception about the public library services in Southern Karnataka. The main objectives of the study are: (i) to know the profile of the YAPL users, (ii)to ascertain the purpose for which they visit the library, (iii)to determine the attitudes of the respondents towards quality of library staff, (iv)to identify the perception of YAPL users towards reading different types of fiction, (v) to know their opinion about library collection and lastly(vi) to determine their attitudes towards services and facilities of public libraries in Southern Karnataka. For the purpose of data collection a structured questionnaire was distributed to 500 YAPL users between 15 to 40 years of age in five Central Libraries located in Mandya, Mysore, Tumkur, Hassan and Bangalore of southern Karnataka. Of the sample selected a sum of 384 valid responses were received. For analyzing the data simple statistical techniques like mean, standard deviation and chi-square tests were used. The result of the study indicate that about 35.4% of respondents are between 21–25 year of age, majority (77.6%) of YAPL users are male, and more number of respondents visit the library daily representing 51.7%. The chi-square test shows that there is a significant difference between the frequencies of responses of YAPL users, hence the null hypotheses are rejected and formulated hypotheses of the study are accepted.