News Academic Libraries Can Use: A Content Analysis of Student Newspapers’ Coverage of University Libraries

The purpose of this master’s paper is to gain an understanding of how students newspapers cover the academic libraries on their campuses. Specifically, this study analyzes three student newspapers’ coverage of their institution’s academic libraries from the previous full academic year (August 2023 through July 2024) for sentiment: positive, negative, neutral, or mixed (both positive and negative). The content analysis investigates how many articles of different sentiments appear for each university, what common words, phrases, or themes (if any) appear among articles of the same sentiment, whether there are similarities between articles of the same sentiment at the student newspapers for different institutions, and more. The analysis found that there are not many similarities among articles of the same sentiment, but some common themes still emerged, including the importance of openness and accessibility in libraries and library programming being regarded positively. Note that only articles which substantively mention the academic libraries at the three institutions are included in the analysis. This content analysis begins to fill a gap in the literature about how (with what tone) academic libraries are covered by their respective student newspapers, and how that might impact university libraries’ promotion of their services to students and students’ perceptions of university libraries.