Digital and Media Literacy in Public Libraries

Digital literacy is the ability to do the things a modern life now requires online: hold an account, fill in a form, attach a document, keep a password, recognise a scam, change a setting that is costing you money. Media literacy is the ability to judge what you are looking at once you get there. Public libraries teach both, to people the rest of the system assumes do not exist, and it has become one of the larger parts of what the buildings actually do.

This is a service rather than a favour. It is timetabled, staffed, funded and reported on, and it looks less like a class than like somebody sitting beside somebody else for twenty minutes.

The gap the service exists to close

Services move online for good reasons and then act as though the move is complete. It is not. Households without a reliable connection, people whose only device is a phone, people with a device and no confidence, people whose reading or eyesight makes a dense interface unusable: these groups are large, they overlap, and they overlap again with the people who most depend on the services being digitised.

The failure is rarely dramatic. Somebody cannot recover a password, so an appointment is missed. A form times out halfway through. A document needs to be a PDF and is a photograph. Each is trivial to fix and impossible to fix alone, and the consequence lands on the person, not on the service that assumed the skill.

What the library provides first

Before any teaching, there is infrastructure: a connection, a machine with a keyboard, a printer, a scanner, and a desk where the two of you can look at the same screen.

The printer matters more than it sounds. A surprising share of online processes end in a document that has to exist on paper, and a household with no printer is a household that cannot finish them. The same goes for scanning proof of identity or address, which is the step where many applications stall.

Help with online services, one person at a time

The most common form of support is unscheduled. Somebody arrives with a letter, a deadline and a login they cannot get past. Staff help with the immediate problem and, where there is time, with the skill underneath it.

There are limits, and good services state them. Library staff do not give legal, medical or financial advice, do not complete an application on somebody’s behalf without their involvement, and do not take custody of passwords or documents. What they can do is get a person through the step that stopped them, which is usually all that was needed. Where the question is about the service rather than the screen, it becomes the kind of enquiry described in Libraries as Community Information Hubs.

Courses, drop-ins and the difference between them

Structured courses cover the basics in sequence: devices, browsers, email, accounts, attachments, video calls, staying safe. They suit people who know they want to learn.

Drop-in sessions suit everybody else. No enrolment, no register, no commitment, arrive with a problem. Attendance is harder to report and the reach is better, because the people who need this most are the least likely to sign up for a ten-week course in something they are embarrassed about.

Both are usually run with partners: adult education providers, charities, banks running fraud-awareness sessions, volunteers with their own reasons for being there. A library’s contribution is the room, the equipment, the audience and the absence of a sales pitch.

Older users, and why the design is different

Sessions aimed at older adults are the most common specialism, and the good ones share a shape. Small groups. The person’s own device rather than a library machine, because that is the one they will go home with. Written notes to take away. Repetition without impatience. And a willingness to answer the question actually being asked rather than the one the curriculum expects.

The subject matter shifts too. Less about productivity, more about staying in touch, managing appointments, recognising a fraudulent message, and not being locked out of a service that used to arrive by post.

Media literacy: judging what is on the screen

Once somebody is online, the second problem starts. Where did this come from, who benefits from my believing it, is this an advertisement, is this a real organisation, why am I seeing it.

Libraries approach this from an unusual angle, because the underlying skill is the one the profession has always taught. A catalogue record states its source, its date and who described it, and evaluating a source is the same operation performed on something messier. How Does a Library Catalogue Work? sets out the tradition that sits behind it, and Digital Library describes the same discipline applied to collections that live online.

In practice sessions cover a short list: check who published it, look for a date, find the original of a quoted claim, notice when a headline and a study disagree, treat an image as an assertion rather than as proof. Generative tools have added a layer, since plausible text is now cheap to produce, which is one of the pressures discussed in Will AI Change Libraries?.

Jobseekers, and the sharp end of all of it

Job search concentrates every skill above into one task with money attached. The application is online, the CV has to be a file, the portal requires an account, the interview may be a video call, and the whole thing is frequently a condition of receiving support.

Libraries are heavily used for this, and the support is a mixture of everything already described: the machine, the printer, help with the form, a quiet corner for the call, and occasionally a volunteer who will read the application before it is sent.

What it adds up to

None of this is glamorous and none of it is easy to count. A digital inclusion figure records sessions delivered, not the consequences avoided, and the person who got through a form in twenty minutes does not appear in any statistic at all.

The argument for funding it is the same argument made for the rest of the service, and it is set out in The Value of Public Libraries: the building is open, free and unconditional, and it is therefore where the people the digital transition left behind actually turn up.

Sources and further reading

The Good Things Foundation publishes research and runs the network many UK library sessions are delivered through. Pew Research Center tracks internet access, device use and attitudes to online information in the United States. For the profession’s own framing of the subject, the IFLA statements on digital and media information literacy are the usual reference point.