The general view of learning has dramatically changed during the last two decades. Today we talk about learning for life and educate to meet the demands of the information society. This new view forces us to constantly relearn and develop new knowledge ? something which has resulted in large restructuring within the upper secondary school. New forms of teaching, where the pupils are given the opportunity to a more active search for knowledge, is developing. In reality this means that the pupils are expected to work independently and supplement the information from their schoolbooks, with material from other sources. This development has for the upper secondary school libraries meant a significant changeover. As intermediaries of information and resources they now are immensely important. At the same time the demands on their service and resources has significantly increased. Today the secondary school libraries are expected to be able to offer their users a fully developed library with a varying range of media, well adapted IT resources, functional premises and professional personnel. These increasing demands, together with the fast development within the area of information technology, has dramatically changed the conditions for the libraries of the upper secondary schools. Is it then possible for these libraries to live up to the demands and expectations of today?
To be able to shed some light on this question we?ve conducted a number of case studies on three different upper secondary schools in the city of Lund in Sweden. Our study consists of a questionnaire survey with a large amount of students on each school and two different interview surveys; one with the school librarians and one with a random selection of teachers. The purpose of these case studies is to investigate whether the three different participant groups on the chosen schools are experiencing that their school library are able to satisfy the information- and service needs of their target groups, or not. On the basis of our results we also would like to examine in what extent these three libraries are adapted to the way of teaching which is applied on their schools.
According to the result of our studies the three school libraries are rather well equipped to meet their users demands and expectations. Our conclusion is that the three libraries, to a larger extent, is able to satisfy their users different information- and service needs. On several different areas though, their service and resources are in need of improvement to fully satisfy all the users needs. Shorthanded staff, too small premises and far too few computers which can be used in search for information, are the biggest problems. The result of our studies also shows that the three libra...
