Abstract
Education has not been, per se, an objective for national libraries. This is not the situation in the national libraries in the less developed countries, where learning is an essential tool for development. However, there has been a great change with regard to this question in national libraries in developed countries, essentially due to the pressure to have new kinds of users, not only scholars and intellectuals. Learning is now of great importance for national libraries, although with great differences depending on the level of development in the particular country. The article presents a brief portrait of the situation in countries as diverse as Benin, Trinidad and Tobago, Indonesia, Malaysia, the United Kingdom and Canada.