Senior High School Students’ Use of Library Resources and Services

Abstract Purpose – School library plays an important role in meeting the information needs of students. Students of Senior High School require information to support their personal, study, and environmental needs. Therefore, to meet their needs, high school students conduct information seeking. This study aims to determine the information seeking behavior of high school students in Surabaya. Design/methodology/approach – The method applied in this study is a descriptive quantitative approach. The samples of this study were high school students in Surabaya-East Java-Indonesia, selected by using multistage random sampling. The data collection was conducted through questionnaires. The sample size is 200 people. Findings – The results of this study indicate that the students’ major need of information relates to entertainment and following educations after graduating from high schools. The majority of high school students perform passive attention through magazines, passive search related to hobbies mostly done through magazines, active search by considering the accuracy as the criteria in choosing information sources, and continuous search through friends as a channel of information exchange. Research limitations/implications: - Practical implications – - Originality/value – Based on these results, libraries at school should provide sources of information which suits with the students’ needs, where magazines mainly support their needs, peers have important role on information sharing, and school libraries, specifically librarians and teachers, must be more proactive on asking their students to take benefit from libraries at schools