Kim Rahn is the managing editor of The Korea Times. Since joining the company in 2003, she has covered various beats including the presidential office, Seoul city government, the Bank of Korea and the tourism industry. In 2014, she won the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) award for her coverage of the ordeals of migrant women in Korea.
College students borrow fewer books
By Kim Rahn
College students are borrowing fewer books from libraries, research shows.
Experts say this reflects an increased use of electronic material.
According to a Korea Education and Research Information Service report, released Sunday, each student at the nation’s 416 colleges borrowed an average of 7.8 books last year.
About 2.5 million students, including graduate students, checked out 19.8 million books, with those at four-year universities borrowing about four times more texts than those at two-year colleges. More than four out of 10 students did not borrow any books.
The number of books borrowed by college students has been decreasing, from 10.3 in 2011 to 9.6 in 2012, 8.7 in 2013 and 7.8 last year.
Researchers said the result reflects the changing functions of school libraries.
“More and more students seek e-materials for studying because most schools have prepared electronic systems for documents such as these and academic journals,” the report said.
About 61.1 percent of the 246.7 billion won libraries spent was for electronic material.
The report said that the tendency to borrow fewer books was partly because students used libraries for other activities such as group studying and resting.
It also said that students paid less attention to reading books because they focused on preparing their qualifications for jobs, such as studying for an English test or internship programs.
A graduate student in Seoul said he used to read a lot of humanities and social science books as well as novels during his freshman and sophomore years.
“But now, when a freshman reads such books, his or her friends say, ‘Wow, you read books! How cultivated!’ They regard reading as a rather idle activity or a waste of time because they think they don’t have enough time even to study English or participate in internship programs,” he said.
According to the report, Korean colleges keep far fewer books than those in the U.S. and Canada.
Korea’s top 20 universities had 2.18 million books on average last year and Seoul National University had 4.7 million, the largest. The 115 colleges in the U.S. and Canada kept 5.26 million books on average in 2012, with Harvard University topping with 19.4 million, according to the Association of Research Libraries.