Biblioteche pubbliche e biblioteche scolastiche: indagine sulle letture psico-pedagogiche nelle biblioteche pubbliche di Pescara

Abstract

The public library almost always also carries out those tasks which should be the responsibility of the school library. This explains why, at the end of the 1970s, there was an almost spontaneous flurry of initiatives which called for a legislative solution to the problem of school libraries' function, which saw the active participation of associations and institutions.

Despite almost twenty years of commitment by those in the sector, the public library continues to carry out an additional role to its institutional function as a result of the parlous state of most school libraries.

Taking 1995 as the reference year, it was decided to focus attention on users who read texts on education and psychology which could be related to teaching. More specifically, it was decided to survey all the loans made in this field in the two public libraries of the city of Pescara.

An analysis of the results allows us to make the following considerations:
a) teachers' interest in publications regarding professional developments aimed at teaching in general and not referred to a specific subject is twenty times greater than that in other types of literature;
b) although structurally different, the two libraries surveyed were only rarely used by the same patrons;
c) with the exception of some pedagogical and psychological classics, the loans concerned mostly works targeted to teachers' continuing education, all texts a school library should hold;
d) when they need to keep themselves up to date, teachers, albeit to a circumscribed degree, resort to the public library, which is, in practice, the sole point of reference which satisfies them in the short term as regards continuing professional education.