The purpose of this study is to clarify the raison d'etre and social function of libraries in the modern age. We examined materials from the fields of philosophy, sociology and media studies that focus on the relationship between the modern subject and the media. After enumerating the objective conditions that a medium would have to fulfill in order to be able to create the individual as a modern subject, we found that the printed book was the first medium to meet all these conditions, and the only one to date to have successfully fulfilled this role. Moreover, the idea of the modern subject is embodied in the idea of modern libraries, which were established in Western countries in the 19th century. We concluded that the essential function of modern libraries for modern society was to form, sustain and reinforce modern subjects through the medium of printed books.

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This research is about how school librarians regard the current system for children with special educational needs (SEN)in the school library. It addresses the school librarian's awareness, current situation and school librarian's holding problems concerning the library support for SEN children. Regarding the solution of the problem, I focus on research on the school librarians' attendance at school staff training, consultation sessions and cooperation between the school librarian and other school staff including the school nurse teacher, school counselor, home room teacher and administrative staff. I surveyed 209 librarians through a questionnaire in fourteen local public elementary and junior high schools in Japan. The results showed librarians felt there were problems and difficulties in supporting SEN children. Hesitation, time constraints, and anxiety were the three problems in the factor analysis. However, the survey also shows that attendance at the school staff training, consultation sessions and collaboration with the school nurse and school counselor who doesn't evaluate students based on their abilities relieved the issues of hesitation and anxiety. Regarding the time constraints, we need to consider the librarian's working conditions as well as review the working contract in light of making improvements with regard to availability of increased working time and attendance at staff training on SEN.

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This paper describes the outline of the public libraries in Seoul City in Korea and the changes for 10 years from 1995 to 2005. We focus the change of their opening hours and their plans of reading room and open-shelf room. It has three characteristics as following: 1) The opening hours has been changed late from 6:00 to 7:00 in summer and to 8:00 in winter. But the closing hours at 22:00 has not been changed. 2) The number of rooms and the number of seats of reading rooms have been decreased for these 10 years. 3) To make the open-shelf room and the digital material room, in many cases the room of another function was moved to other rooms. Especially in this case, the number of reading rooms has been decreased. A peculiar part of the developing process of public libraries in Seoul was specified by analyzing the mechanism that the reading rooms were decreased and the open-shelf room was set up newly.

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