The Effect of Social Networks on the Development of Information Literacy of Young Members of Public Libraries (Case Study: North Khorasan Province)

Determining the effect of virtual social networks on the development of information literacy of young people is the main purpose of this research.

This research is of a descriptive-survey type in terms of practical purpose and in terms of data collection method. For the statistical population, young people aged 18 to 35 were considered members of the library in North Khorasan province, whose number was 9003, and according to Cochran's formula, 368 people were selected as a sample. The main tool for collecting information in this research is Doel's information literacy questionnaires (1994), Jalali's social networks questionnaire, and Qiyazi's questionnaire (2018). Cronbach's alpha was used to determine the reliability of the questionnaires previously confirmed by the researchers, and their reliability was obtained as 0.92 and 0.99 respectively.

Social networks can predict 69.3% of the information literacy changes of young people in public libraries. Comparison of information literacy in terms of the use of virtual social networks showed that users who rated their use of virtual social networks as average, had higher information literacy compared to other groups. In terms of duration of use, information literacy was higher in users who used less, compared to other groups. In addition, the average information literacy of Instagram and Telegram users was higher than other groups. The results also showed that the average information literacy of users with real identities on virtual social networks is higher than users with fake identities.

The results showed that information literacy in people who use virtual social networks is higher than people who do not use these networks and this difference is statistically significant.