School libraries are agents of current education
and an essential part of development of future
life-long competences. In order to evaluate the
work of school libraries, we need to establish
criteria which take into account all factors
affecting their quality. Center for International
Scholarship and School Libraries (CISSL) at
Rutgers University (USA) has developed a model
of quality school library. From the point of viewof
our paper, which is of methodological nature, the
essential part is the development of the
methodology which resulted in the model and to
see how this methodology can be applied in
researching the quality of school libraries in two
neighboring countries, Slovenia and Croatia,
where school libraries have until 1991 developed
according to the same standards, guidelines and
regulations, but followed different paths since
then. Therefore, in the paper we discuss
methodological issues related to identification of
the sample of good school libraries and the
possibilities of testing the CISSL model of
quality school library in the two countries. We
expect that the research and use of the CISSL
methodology in two countries in question
provide findings on possible futire research also
in other countries.