Social role and function of public libraries: the librarian point of view

Abstract

Public libraries already assume, as one of their priorities, to facilitate access to information and digital literacy, understood as a requirement for the basic human right to information. Because of it, libraries facilitate information and digital literacy services devoted to improving users’ competences for a critical, reflexive and intentional use of information. This function has been recently valued as a compensatory factor of the digital divide of vulnerable user, and a way to reduce their degree of social exclusion. The aim of this research is to analyze the potential and limitations that public libraries present when design and apply information and digital literacy services for their users. The methodology is based on qualitative techniques as the interview and the discussion groups. Interviews to librarians were carried out to ten considered expert ones using a questionnaire including ten questions linked with the social function and about the role that public libraries should play for social inclusion of citizens. Points of view of public librarians of the Region of Murcia was obtained by means of three groups of discussion selected according with population size of cities where are located their libraries following the same script, structured according with topics about social inclusion services as their human and material resources, competences needed by librarians, typology of users, and so on. The discourses obtained confirm that librarians have different conceptions about the social function of the library and, therefore, manifest a different degree of commitment to this role. This commitment is conditioned by aspects such as resources, the type of users or the training of the librarian and, above all, the attitudes of librarians as well as local political leaders are very relevant. To minimize these restrictions, a set of leadership and collaboration strategies must be developed with other agents, external and internal, which are described in the document.