• Journal of the Korean Society for information Management
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.297-316
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• 2015

This study looks into how hearing-impaired college students use libraries and what their information needs are in order to prepare basic materials which would be applied for developing a library service program and others proper enough to be used by the hearing-impaired college students. In order to achieve the research goal, the study gathered data from a total of 155 hearing-impaired college students through a survey and interviews and a frequency analysis, a cross validation, a t-test and a one-way ANOVA were conducted to analyze the data. At the end of its research, the study confirmed that the hearing-impaired college students' gender, years, degrees of disability, schools, specialties and prosthetic appliances would make significant differences in how the students use the libraries. In addition, the study took a look into differences in the hearing-impaired college students' information needs caused by types of the students' prosthetic appliances, schools and degrees of disability and found out that these types of the prosthetic appliances the students use would significantly affect every category of their information needs. The study now also understands that both the schools and the degrees of disability would make significant differences in a few categories of the information needs, and the former influences education and promotion targeting users and arrangement of sign language interpreters while the latter affects education and promotion targeting users and improvements in browsing environments.