The evolution of technostress: much of what I found out about technostress and librarians' remains just as pertinent today as it was 10 years ago.(Column)

Nearly 10 years have passed since I researched, wrote, and defended my thesis, "Technostress in the Reference Environment: A Survey of U.S. Association of Research Libraries Academic Reference Librarians," at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Two things shock me: that it has been 10 years since grad school and that much of what I found out about technostress and librarians remains just as pertinent today as it was then. I became interested in technostress for two reasons. First, I wanted to be a systems librarian. When I was a library assistant in 1994, I learned how to code HTML in Notepad on a Sun SPARC that ran UNIX, and I loved it. Second, I wanted Carol Tenopir to direct my thesis, so I looked for a topic that would interest her as well. Not only did I hit upon a fascinating subject that piqued Tenopir's curiosity, it caught the attention of everyone else as well. Not a single job interview went by where I didn't spend the majority of the time answering questions about technostress.

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Technostress Background

As I delved deeper into the topic, I realized that there was very little written specifically on librarians and technostress. In the early 1980s, Craig Brod, a psychotherapist and consultant on integrating new technologies into the workplace, was one of the first to define technostress. Brod's description of technostress as a "modern disease of adaptation caused by an inability to cope with new computer technologies in a healthy manner" had become the standard and accepted definition. I found only two librarians who were researching technostress at that time: Sara Fine …