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The paper analyses students' use of public libraries for study purposes and discusses the public library as a substitute or a complement for educational or academic libraries. The paper also investigates which segments of students rely heavily on public libraries as services for study purposes.

The research is based on a comprehensive survey of Danish students from both universities and other higher institutions of education. The data collection was carried out by an online survey and the sample consists of students from all over the country covering a multitude of different institutions and subject areas.

It is evident from the research that students do not bypass the physical library and it is also evident that the use of physical libraries and digital resources complement each other. The place of Google in the students' information behaviour is prominent and positively correlated to use of traditional library resources. Nearly 60 per cent of all students use the local public library for study purposes. A small group consisting of 7 per cent of the students uses the public library as their only library for study purposes. One of the more striking findings is that the service level of public libraries in relation to study topics appears to be very uneven, which means that different groups of students have very varied probabilities of success using the public library. The data also indicates that students tend to look at libraries as a whole and do not make clear distinctions between different types of libraries, expecting the whole system to be seamless. The paper also relates the findings to the general body of literature on students' information seeking behaviour.

The research raises questions concerning the detailed behaviour of students' information behaviour, for example, how they combine formalised resources with more general resources. The paper also indicates that it is probably counter‐productive to evaluate students as one group. Different segments of students have very different and varied information behaviour patterns depending on study topic, study year, psychological dispositions and other demographic factors.

The paper raises important managerial questions and concerns in relation to both the mission of public libraries and the service level given to different segments of students.

The research supports existing international research on students' information behaviour. The research is based on a comprehensive and nation‐wide sample and it emphasises students' information behaviour in relation to several important demographic factors, and it also asserts that it is important to investigate further the differing modes of behaviour. The paper points to the interplay between formalised information resources and search engines.

The history of the public library is long and rich, and continues to reflect this institution's initial mission: to respond to the needs of an evolving democratic society. From its early days as a subscription service for the middle-class, through its evolution to become an educational site for the lower-classes and new immigrants, the public library has served as a touch-stone for urban industrial society in North America (Lerner, 1998, p. 138; Shera, 1974). Over the past century, public libraries have evolved to respond to the growing needs of the communities they serve and continue to do so with recent advances in technologies (such as DVDs, electronic books, the Internet, etc.), and with a more global outlook on the ways that people seek and share information. Indeed, the public library's constituents today are exceedingly diverse, including children and adults from a broad range of socio-economic, cultural, and educational backgrounds, all of whom seek information for a variety of personal and work-related purposes. The fact that public libraries have been fulfilling patrons' information needs for well over a century is a testament to their enduring success and versatility as information providers, and also points to the overall effectiveness of public librarians as intermediaries in the provision process.

This chapter reviews the study of individual differences in information behaviour; those differences which are not due to demographic factors such as age, gender, education or occupation, but rather to personality factors and to learning and thinking styles. It examines studies of patterns in information behaviour and of personality and similar factors in groups of information-focused occupations, as well as studies which have explicitly sought to relate information behaviour to such factors. The aim of the chapter is to assess how far we have come in being able to identify and measure ‘information style’, a quality different from any other categorisation of personality or of intellectual styles. If this goal were achieved, it would be a valuable concept for the academic study of information-related behaviours, as well as being of practical usefulness for the design of information systems and services, the evaluation of the effectiveness of such systems and the training of users. It could also allow a tailored provision of information, particularly for creative or innovative purposes.

In vol. 6, 1976, of Advances in Librarianship, I published a review about relevance under the same title, without, of course, “Part I” in the title (Saracevic, 1976). [A substantively similar article was published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science (Saracevic, 1975)]. I did not plan then to have another related review 30 years later—but things happen. The 1976 work “attempted to trace the evolution of thinking on relevance, a key notion in information science, [and] to provide a framework within which the widely dissonant ideas on relevance might be interpreted and related to one another” (ibid.: 338).

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which academic researchers consider the relationship between broadband access and children’s information seeking in the United States. Because broadband has been cited as an essential element of contemporary learning, this study sought to identify gaps in the attention given to the role of broadband in the information seeking environment of youth.

The researchers conducted a mixed method synthesis of academic research published in peer-reviewed journals between 1991 and 2011 that reported the information seeking of children aged 5–18 years. Quantitative and qualitative data were gathered from leading databases, analyzed separately, and conclusions drawn from integrated results.

The results of this study indicated that broadband is rarely considered in the design of children’s information seeking published in peer-reviewed research journals. Only 15 studies showed any presence of broadband in study design or conclusions. Due to the small number of qualifying studies, the researchers could not conduct the synthesis; instead, the researchers conducted a quantitative relationship analysis and qualitative content analysis.

Given the focus of policymaking and public discussion on broadband, its absence as a study consideration suggests a crucial gap for scholarly researchers to address.

The data set included only studies of children in the United States, therefore, findings may not be universally applicable.

Despite national imperatives for ubiquitous broadband and a tradition of information seeking research in library and information science (LIS) and other disciplines, a lack of academic research about how broadband affects children’s information seeking persists.