The digital public librarian´s mission : How the librarian experiences his or her digital competence and the digital development within the public library

The purpose of this study is to examine what the public librarians think about the digital development. The thesis will also examine how the public librarians consider their skills when it comes to digitalization and the digital work they attempt to do in the public library. This examination will be done by interviewing eight public librarians who have worked in the public library for more than ten years. The empirical information is collected by semi-structured interviews of the librarians and the results are analysed by using qualitative content analysis. The theory that is used for the analysing of the thesis is Mark Prensky's “Digital natives, digital immigrants” (2001a, 2001b). Emily Wang, Michael D. Myers and David Sundaram's “Digital natives and digital immigrants – Towards a model of digital fluency” from 2013 is another theoretical article that is used for this study. Also – in the discussion, cognitive authority will be addressed with concepts from the article “Credibility and cognitive authority of information” written by Soo Young Rieh (2009). The thesis shows that there is a variety in the public librarians´ digital competence. It also shows that overall the public librarians think that it is important to be the guidance for the public, to gain digital competence and help the digital outsiders into democracy. All in all, most of the public librarians who were interviewed consider themselves as trustworthy and reliable and comfortable in their digital mission.