The public library and the skills of the XXI century

Abstract

Since the beginning of the XX century, public libraries have been contested. Initially, the biggest criticism was focused on those libraries which seemed a book deposit, and how they could cooperate to the development of the industrial society and also, afterwards, the post-industrial society. With the coming of the information society, new challenges came up, like the transformation from the print to digital, the training of readers... New skills were demanded to librarians to overcome these challenges. Since their first years of existence, libraries have been understood as temples of knowledge and truth. Nowadays, political, economic and ideological interests support the post-truth crisis, over abundance of information, manipulation of the information and fake news. Within this context, identification and development of information skills has become essential. Moreover, it is a duty of public libraries to create the conditions to satisfy the new demands of the information & knowledge society. Based on comparative studies, a bibliographic review and qualitative methodologies, this article analyzes the community divide, the reading mediation, the information skills, both the return on investment (ROI) and the social return on investment (SROI), and to demonstrate how the new model of public library is able to cope with the needs of the XXI century´s citizens.