Information literacy, learning, and the public library: A study of Danish high school students

Abstract

The paper reports on a study of 12 Danish high school students’ perceptions of public libraries’ role in learning, user education, information literacy, and librarians’ information competencies. The study is undertaken by use of literature review and interviews with a purposive select sample of public library users in Denmark. The study demonstrates that public libraries are considered an important place for learning. The high school students view the public librarians as very competent and as good at helping them to develop their information needs, identify sources, and support the students in the information search processes. The high school students show rather good critical skills, but poor information need developing skills. The study further shows that concepts of information literacy and lifelong learning are not very well understood by the users, i.e. the high school students. The results have a range of implications, both for pedagogical praxis in the public library and for Library and Information Science (LIS).