Children's Media Culture: A Key to Libraries of the Future?

From abstract: "Public libraries offer key arenas of galvanising children's socio-cultural expressions and expectations of the future. A main argument of the paper is that today these expressions and expectations feed on a complex media culture, and therefore both physical and virtual libraries need to offer young users high-quality output within all semiotic modes of representation - texts, images and sounds - and high-quality input within these modes through engaged dialogues between users and professional librarians skilled in quality assessment across different modes of representation. The main argument is substantiated through a brief analysis of global trends in children's media uses and their socio-cultural divides and through examples of the challenges facing multimodal libraries."