This study is a literature review with a qualitative research approach of previously written bachelor thesis about the perception of librarianship. The literature search was done through the database DiVA, with fixed premises. The papers that were chosen studied either the perception of librarianship from the outside world (for example community, users, popular culture, newspapers) or librarians’ own perception of the profession. The purpose of the study has been to determine perceptions of librarianship, if stereotypes about the profession lives on and what that could say about the profession’s status in general, which have been described as low. The conclusion is that stereotypes do appear in popular culture and that the librarian, for the most part, is seen as a reading person with a great passion for books and is almost always tied with the library. Librarians see themselves as service minded, competent and acknowledges the users’ need as their primary job. The low status of the profession is mostly visible through the eyes of some librarians and students, who feels the need to defend their knowledge and competence, but also in the way stereotypes are portrayed. All in all, though, librarians are seen as neutral – neither in a negative or positive way. A way to develop the research about perceptions of librarianship is to see if and how it affects the librarians daily professional life.

This study aims to look at the public reception of the literary form called feelbad. The empirical material is a selection of digital and printed documents and the method used is qualitative content analysis. Feelbad is a literary form which does not have a clear definition but is however used by both regular and professional readers. This study examines how regular and professional readers describe and value feelbad in terms of emotional reactions. This purpose is achieved by using theorist Rita Felski’s (2008) four modes of textual engagements (shock, enchantment, knowledge and recognition) and three different categories of literary value (emotional, style/form and knowledge) presented by Forslid et al. (2015). Literature often has an undisputed goodness assigned to it by society. Which is why it might be considered important to look at how readers are emotionally affected by the dark or depressing narrative of feelbad and how they value this literature. The result indicates that readers were altogether positive in their reception and often expressed physical reactions evoked by feelbad, whether if the reading experience was considered pleasurable or emotionally difficult. Readers often described feelbad as a form of literature that emotionally affect them either by depictions of suffering or abuse or by the beautiful written language. This is important knowledge to the library work since it shows how readers use literature and can be an important insight to how the librarians can develop their work with readers’ advisory or library shelving.

The aim of this study is to examine the discourses that occur about the role of the public library in four journals. Two from the daily newspapers and two from trade magazines during the period between 2007 and 2022. By identifying the discourses that try to define the role of the public library over the past 15 years, we aim to get a clearer picture of the similarities and differences that exist between the expectations of the public library, and how this affects its legitimacy.  We have identified four discourses that in different ways try to define what role the public library should have in society. It is the book discourse, the meeting place discourse, the silence discourse, and the information-mediating discourse. During the period we studied, these are struggling to achieve hegemony and they are all more or less prominent in the debates that appear in the daily newspapers and in the magazines. The most prominent discourses in the daily newspapers are the meeting place discourse and the silence discourse. In the magazines, it is the meeting place discourse and the information-mediating discourse that are the most prominent. The discourses are struggling to define the role of the library and what kind of users the library should direct its activities to. The fact that the meeting place discourse is prominent in both daily newspapers and in magazines indicates that libraries have an important role as a social meeting place.

In this thesis I look at five YouTube videos recommending lesbian literature within the YouTube sub community known as BookTube, with the purpose of exploring how BookTube creators mediate lesbian literature and stimulate a reading desire among lesbian readers through their recommendation videos. Using a deductive content analysis, I analysed the BookTube videos to gain an understanding of why and how the video creators recommend lesbian literature to their viewers. This was then followed by a thematic analysis of each respective videos commentsection, to explore the responses left by the commenters and understand what they gained out of the videos and how it has affected their desire to read, using the literature stimulating theories of subjective relevance along with personal/impersonal experiential/instrumental reading. I also explored the identity strengthening opportunities regarding the lesbian literature and community offered through BookTube. The theory of Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Continuum have been used when discussing the lesbian angle of this thesis and connects to the reading stimulation through subjective relevance. The last theory used when analysing the comments of the video is the digital closet, which refers to when people use the selective anonymity of the internet to determine how much of their sexual identity they share.The study found that lesbian literature had a positive effect on the identity building of both the people making the video as well as on the commenters commenting on the video. The videos also had a literature stimulating effect on the commenters, with many commenters reporting they put the recommended books on their own to-be-read list, or recommending more books to the video creator and other commenters. Furthermore, the anonymity of the internet appears to give commenters who are not out with their sexual identity in real life the security to come out to the other people within the lesbian BookTube community.

The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to explore and gain insight into the research about efforts to promote literacy among children and adolescents and that are conducted by school and public libraries. And how studies about these literacy efforts take gender into account during research. To gain insight into the research topic within the library and information science area, a literature review was conducted. To gather articles for the review, criterions were formulated regarding the research questions and the purpose of the thesis. The criterions were then used to decide which article to include in the review among the articles that each database presented with the search string. For this thesis I used Dolatkhah’s (2010) theory of the four M of reading to analyse the articles that were gathered for the purpose of study. The results from the analysis show, that among other things, to the importance of cultivating a positive attitude to reading among both genders. That access to books, either at home or by a library can influence reading habits positively. Research underscores that both girls and boys consider reading to be a feminine activity. Meanwhile, girls on average also receive more encouragement to read books than boys.

The aim of this bachelor thesis is to study how school librarians working in elementary and middle schools describe and obtain their competence, and how they work to make their competence visible through collaborations within the school organization. The empirical material consists of five semi structured interviews with school librarians. The theoretical framework consists of a competence model which divides competence into five different categories and the two concepts; formal and real legitimacy. The method of analysis is qualitative content analysis which is being used to code the empirical material. The result of this study shows that school librarians have a wide range of skills from all the categories in the competence model and that different sets of skills are being used depending on the work task. Reading promotion skills and social competence is especially prominent in the result. The study shows that they obtain their competence through formal education in Library and Information Science and that they continue to develop their skills throughout their professional life. The results show that the competence of school librarians are made visible for example through collaboration with teachers and that being an integral part of the school organization is vital for enabling these collaborations.

This bachelor’s thesis is written in the scientific field of library- and information science. The purpose of the study is to investigate the collaboration between teachers and school librarians from the perspective of school librarians. Six school librarians have been interviewed regarding their views on the collaboration with teachers. The theoretical framework used in this study is Montiel-Overalls Teacher and librarians collaboration (TLC) with its four models of collaborations and the big five that is described in TLC. The methods used in this study are qualitative interviews and qualitative content analysis. The study shows that collaboration takes place mostly within the models A (coordination) and B (cooperation). Some collaborations have components from model C (integrated instruction) but only one of the school librarians comes near model D (integrated curriculum). There are not much deeper forms of collaboration in the results of this study mostly due to the lack of planning and evaluate together. Limitations for collaboration between school librarians and teachers are lack of time, lack of support from the principal and ignorance from booth teachers and principals of what a school librarian can contribute to the school’s education and student’s learning in collaboration with the schools other teaching staff. All of the school librarians in this study thinks that the principals commitment is very important for legitimizing the school librarians role in schoolwork.

The purpose of this master’s thesis is to study the perceptions of accessibility among users and staff at a Swedish public library in a sparsely-populated area. The subject of public libraries in sparsely-populated areas has been studied in a number of previous theses, but a lack of user perspective is evident. This thesis poses two questions: What are the similarities and differences in the users’ and the staff’s perceptions of accessibility in the library services? What are the similarities and differences between users’ and staff’s perceptions of accessibility and their perceptions of the roles of the library respectively? The study’s theoretical frameworks was derived from Michael Buckland’s model of information barriers, and Andersson and Skot-Hansen’s model of the four roles of the public library. The method of data collection was primarily semistructured interviews with users and staff, to a lesser degree document analysis and observations. The results show that users focus on the barrier of too short opening hours, and lack of certain content in the library collection, whereas the staff view the strained human resources as the largest barrier to accessibility. Perceptions of the overall library operation can help to explain the differences. The users view the library as a somewhat static range of services associated with culture and knowledge, whereas the staff perceive the library as playing a active role in promoting culture and knowledge.

I denna kvalitativa intervjustudie undersöktes tre skolbibliotekariers upplevelser av läsfrämjande vid gymnasieskolan. Syftet var också att studera om skolbibliotekarierna arbetade läsfrämjande mot en viss målgrupp, och vilken syn de hade på läsning i skolan. Det teoretiska ramverk som använts för analys av de intervjuer som genomförts behandlar begrepp såsom kulturellt kapital, instrumentell läsning och utmaningar för skolbibliotekarien. Resultatet visade att om än inte informanterna själva ansåg att de arbetade läsfrämjande riktat mot en specifik målgrupp, så var det läsfrämjande arbetet främst fokuserat till elever vid yrkesprogram. Det fanns två anledningar till detta, en av skolbibliotekarierna upplevde en personlig känsla av att kunna förändra och påverka läsningen hos elever vid yrkesprogram. Två av skolbibliotekarierna pekade på en bristande läsförmåga som skäl till att de startat upp ett läsprojekt vid yrkesprogram på deras gymnasieskola. Uppsatsen undersöker därtill skolbibliotekariers syn på läsning vid gymnasieskolan. Två olika aspekter av läsning framkom, å ena sidan den som fokuserar på en instrumentell läsning och å andra sidan en abstrakt syn på läsande.

This thesis aims to investigate the elements in the implementation of information technology at the National library of Namibia and the library at the University of Namibia. It examines different components that have an impact on the two libraries use of information technology. It deals with the personel, support from the government and foreign aid donours, the users, co-operation with other institutions, the situation for libraries in Africa and the development of information technology in the African and Namibian society.The paper also illustrates the present situation at the two libraries, with their different experiences of the computer equipment, internal databases, on-line connections, CD-ROM and plansfor the future. Prospects for the successful use of information technology at the libraries are also discussed.