The responsibility for publishing Scandinavian Public Library Quarterly has been transferred to Helsinki for the next five years, but the editorial work will continue unchanged. The previous meeting of the editors, where the theme of this issue was determined, was held in Copenhagen last autumn; the next meeting will be held in Stockholm this spring. For the most part, editorial work and communications are conducted online, there is no real editorial office.

This year, it was Finland’s turn to take
the chair in the Nordic Council of
Ministers and in the committees. Cooperation between Scandinavian countries has a long history, but is there a
future?
It seems that European and global
networking is becoming more attractive to the youth than the traditional
cooperation with Scandinavian neighbours.

Scandinavian public libraries have a
long, shared tradition and common
point of view concerning the role of
public libraries in the knowledge society. There is a common concern
about young library patrons; they
should feel that library services are also
for them, they should learn to make
good use of library services.

As a target group, teens are often considered to be difficult. Library projects
involving teens are often focused on
poetry or music, but as book presentations have unexpectedly risen to a new
high in Finland, there is a growing
number of enthusiastic librarians with
a challenging new mission. When done
with wholehearted involvement book
presentations are bound to be a success.

A generation that spends its time on
the Internet communicating with likeminded people, will not necessarily
find the library’s online services very
interesting. In-depth information
searches are indeed much more demanding than Googling, collections
which have been classified and catalogued according to the rules are not
half as entertaining as the miscellaneous lists of favourite books on the
social networking sites.
Should libraries be more visible also on
these sites, should they go outside their
traditional frames to meet young library patrons in their favourite spaces? It
might be worth a try, and anyhow
there is definitely a lot to be learned
here.

Sello is the name of a shopping centre
in the municipality of Espoo in the
metropolitan area, built for an urban
lifestyle, with market squares, pedestrian and bicycle routes, cafés and
shops. Sello is also a concert hall with
four hundred seats and the spacious
Sello Library. In Pointti (the Point)
young patrons can borrow books, read,
listen to music or use the computers.
The Gamepoint area is, as the name
indicates, designed for computer games
and console games, here for instance
Runescape can be played by up to
twelve participants. In the digital music
studio patrons can make their own
CDs. At Yesbox youth leaders answer
all possible and impossible questions.

Young patrons can also click into
Habbo Hotel and create their own
avatar and discuss with avatars chosen
by youth leaders from the entire
metropolitan area. Mobbing and game
addiction are examples of talking
points in Habbo Hotel’s netari.fi.
About half of young patrons visiting
the library have a foreign background.
Sello Library is, in many senses, a welldesigned social site for young library
patrons.

Library 10 in Helsinki is another
example of a library that largely
attracts young people. Library 10 (see
article in SPLQ 4/2005) immediately
became the city library’s most used
location when it opened on April 1,
2005. The majority of patrons in this
library are 20-30 year-olds and 60 % of
the borrowers are - atypically enough
young men.

To succeed in attracting young library
patrons there should apparently be a
conscious acclimatisation to the
various demands of new lifestyles, an
understanding of the special needs of
this target group. A free-floating ambience with enough space for patrons’
own creativity seems to be essential.
Doing things together, interactively.

Barbro Wigell-Ryynänen
Counsellor for Library Affairs
Ministry of Education and Culture
Finland

barbro.wigell-ryynanen@minedu.fi