Investigating the relationship between library anxiety and emotional intelligence

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between library anxiety and emotional intelligence of Bushehr University of Medical Sciences’ students and Persian Gulf University’s students in Bushehr municipality. In this descriptive study which is of correlation type, 700 students of Bushehr University of Medical Sciences and the Persian Gulf University selected through stratified random sampling. Required data has been collected using normalized Siberia Shrink’s emotional intelligence questionnaire and localized Bostick’s library anxiety scale. The results show that the rate of library anxiety among students is less than average (91.73%) except “mechanical factors”. There is not a significant difference in all factors of library anxiety except “interaction with librarian” between male and female. The findings also indicate that there is a negative significant relationship between library anxiety and emotional intelligence (r= -0.41). According to the results, it seems that by improving the emotional intelligence we can decrease the rate of library anxiety among students during their search in a library. Emotional intelligence can optimize academic library’s productivity.