Library anxiety refers to the "feeling that one’s research skills are inadequate and that those shortcomings should be hidden". In some students this manifests as an outright fear of libraries and the librarians who work there. The term stems from a 1986 article by Constance Mellon, a professor of library science in the U.S. state of North Carolina, titled "Library anxiety: A grounded theory and its development" in the College & Research Libraries journal.

When Mellon published her article in 1986, the term "library anxiety" was new, but the phenomenon had been observed and reported by previous library researchers. In 1972, Mary Jane Swope and Jeffrey Katzer discovered, through interviews, that students at their university were intimidated by the library and afraid to seek help from library personnel. In 1982, Geza Kosa surveyed university students in Australia and found similar results. None of these researchers had a specific term to apply to the phenomenon they were seeing until Mellon's study.

Mellon's landmark two-year qualitative research study, which included 6,000 students at a Southern university in the United States, found that 75 to 85 percent described their initial response to library research in terms of fear. Mellon used the term "library anxiety" to describe the feelings of discomfort and fear a group of undergraduate English composition students described when they were starting an information search that required using the academic library. The study revealed four primary reasons to explain feelings of library anxiety. The students:

Mellon further discovered that these negative feelings often overwhelmed students to the point that they could not function effectively in the library. It was found that they had a feeling of inferiority when they compared their library skills to those of other students, and that these feelings of inadequacy were a source of shame that made them hesitant to ask library staff for help. Mellon alerted faculty members outside the library that these behaviors constituted problems that needed to be addressed. She likened library anxiety to mathematical anxiety and test anxiety. She suggested that library anxiety should be recognized and the anxious person provided with experiences in which they could succeed.

Mellon advocates the use of qualitative research, as it provided a deeper insight into information behavior. She comments that her study applied the rarely used methods of qualitative research to a library problem, and states that while the study was important, the implications of the research technique were far greater. She used the technique of personal writing or journal writing to collect data in which the writer is "talking on paper" with no concern for audience, style, grammar, or spelling, which allows the writer to tap into a stream of consciousness. The students' personal writing was analyzed for recurrent themes.

Despite Mellon's goal to increase the use of qualitative research methods in library science, library anxiety did not become popular as a research topic until Sharon Bostick created the Library Anxiety Scale, a quantitative tool to measure it, in 1992. Doris J. Van Kampen created a new instrument in 2004, the Multidimensional Library Anxiety Scale (MLAS), to take into account off-campus use of library resources and master's and doctoral student attitudes. Gillian S. Gremmels reexamined Mellon's work and its impact on the library profession in a 2015 article.

The rate of research on the topic increased dramatically after 1993.

In a 2007 study of graduate students, Kwon, Onwuegbuzie and Alexander found that "weak critical thinking dispositions in the areas of self-confidence, inquisitiveness and systematicity were particularly associated with high levels of library anxiety." Systematicity was defined as being disposed toward organizing, logical, focused and attentive inquiry. However, the scope of their study did not allow these findings to be generalized to undergraduates.