The paper presents a case study of an integrated public and school library network in a highly diverse multiethnic urban neighbourhood, where intercultural practices and long-term competence building strategies have successfully been developed. These practices are outlined, and some of the conditions needed to develop a strongly integrated library network of this kind are considered.

The library’s collaborative networks are discussed as Communities of practice (Lave & Wenger1991; Wenger, 1998), and the case methodology draws on Stake (1995). The study is based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with librarians and staff at activity centres conducted in 2012.

The school libraries in the network are managed and partly staffed by a core team of public librarians. Librarians and teachers have developed effective forms of collaboration (cf Pihl 2009, 2011, 2012) and the librarians are an integrated part of the teaching teams.The public library also works in close cooperation with activity centres, the local community and associations. The pedagogical approaches of the public library draw on the Scandinavian popular education tradition (Klasson, 1997). Multimodal literacies in all languages spoken in the neighbourhood are supported. This engages the student as a member of society, not limited to the role of learner at school. The approach is empowering, and conducive to engagement in local or global sustainability projects. Pooling resources in the network has provided the means for establishing continuous professional and interprofessional development processes, as well as mechanisms for disseminating know-how, where the librarians function as knowledge brokers.

The network has worked through long-term processes (cf Lundholm, 2011) with boundary-crossing intercultural pedagogies (Pihl 2012) based on critical reflection (Fabos, 2008; Vare & Scott, 2007), cooperation and active participation. Embracing diversity and opening spaces where people of multiple cultures meet contributes to justice oriented citizenship (Westheimer & Kahne 2004) and action competence (Almers, 2009; Mogensen & Schnack, 2010).

Exchanging experiences of such practice based models for school / library collaboration is particularly interesting since the Nordic countries share fundamental aims of inclusive education (Egeland, Haug & Persson, 2006) with similar popular education traditions, while the institutional and legal basis for collaboration differs.