Uses and Gratifications in the Networked Academic Library: A Theoretical Framework for Social Media Engagement Among University Library Users

Abstract

Academic libraries now run much of their outreach, service, and community-building through social media, yet the research documenting this shift remains heavily descriptive. Studies count platforms, record how often libraries post, and report adoption rates, but they rarely ask why users attend to a library’s social media presence or what satisfactions bring them back. This paper argues that the uses and gratifications (U&G) tradition, adapted to the conditions of the academic library, is the most suitable audience-centred lens for that explanatory work. Drawing on the classical U&G literature, its renewal for interactive and social media, and library and information science scholarship on social media adoption, the paper develops an integrated framework built around seven gratification domains: informational-cognitive, academic-instrumental, social-integrative and networking, affective-entertainment, self-presentational and esteem, affordance-based, and privacy as a moderating condition. It couples the classical needs typology of Katz and colleagues with the affordance logic of Sundar and Limperos, and it adds two structural moderators that personal-use models tend to ignore: institutional supply and academic role. Eight propositions specify relationships among gratifications sought, gratifications obtained, continued engagement, and scholarly content creation, among them the expectation that a gap between what users seek and what they obtain predicts disengagement. The paper closes by treating information overload, distraction, misinformation, and privacy concern as limits internal to any honest gratification account, and by drawing out implications for theory, for measurement in mixed-method research, and for practice.