This master thesis is aiming to find out how school libraries work towards children in school years 1-6. The mainfocus is how the school librarians and teachers work with literature and reading. The theoretical viewpoints aremainly the sociocultural theory and the child perspective.The study was conducted with participants from five different schools in Uppsala, in the form of qualitativesemi-structured interviews. The results show that schools work with literature first and foremost in a pragmaticway, with reading-strategies and activating discussions. Very little time is spent on reading for its own sake. Thegeneral opinion is that the school libraries could – and should – be used more in the daily school work. Thelibrarians claim that they lack both time and financial resources to execute certain projects or be able to offer awider diversity of material. Finally, it is obvious that school libraries vary a lot in both ambition and resources.

Mediation of fiction for adult users in Swedish public libraries is a subject which has been little studied from a theoretical perspective. The motivation for this thesis was based on this realization, and the opinion that actual library users too seldom get their voices heard in library and information science-research. The thesis analyzes interviews with seven library users in which they have been asked to talk about the librarys work with mediating fiction. The answers are analyzed using a discourse analytic approach to see how the librarys work with mediating fiction is constructed in the users talk. Two main discourses are identified, one authoritative and one neutral. In the authoritative discourse librarians are talked of as experts who have the knowledge to guide users to the ”right” literature. In the neutral discourse the librarians role is to be open to all different kinds of literature that may be demanded by users. In librarians talk, as seen in previous studies, the mediation of today was often talked of as oriented towards performative experiences and a more personal role for the librarian. The traditional roles of librarian as mediator and user as recipient were being loosened up as there was talk of more user engagement in the mediation. This way of talking about the mediation however, was not that evident in the interviews with users. One could say that the users had a more conservative view. The public library does'nt have to be either a place that only values high quality literature or only happenings and user engagement. It should be the library's role to communicate more complex pictures of the library to the public. It should also be a task for libraries and people who do research on libraries to listen to the voices of real users, even if they don't always come with simple answers to how the library should develop their work with mediating fiction. This is a two years master’s thesis in Archive, Library and Museum studies.

This thesis examines the literature promotion towards adults in an established literary magazine. The basis for the study are the different surveys noting the decline in the populations reading and writing abilities. The aim of the thesis is to investigate the attitudes towards, and images of, reading and literature appearing i the magazine Vi Läser, from 2011 to 2015. The research questions are concerned with the beliefs and perceptions in regards to reading that Vi Läser convey, and what aspects of literature the magazine emphasizes. As a theoretical basis the critical discourse analysis as formulated by the linguist Norman Fairclough has been utilized. It is supplemented with Pierre Bordieus work on social differentiation and the theory of reading dimensions outlined by Sten Furhammar. A close reading has been applied to the selected issues of Vi Läser, whereby three dominant discourses has been made visible. These are termed ”the prestige discourse”, ”the utility discourse” and ”the pleasure discourse”. The studys findings are put in relation to the relevant discursive and social practices. The discursive practice examined is the realm of printed journals. This proved to be marked by a variety of approaches towards reading, and it was found that the discourses prevalent in Vi Läser constituted only a small selection of the mediated images of the activity. The social practice of interest is the realm of the public library. The findings illustrate a considerable congruence between the images of reading promoted in Vi Läser to that of official documents and reports. At the same time, it is stated that adults are a low priority in the context of the public library. Vi Läsers literature promotion is considered to have an important role to play in this regard. Finally, it is suggested that public libraries embrace Vi Läsers pleasure discourse in its literature promotion towards adults. This is a two years master’s thesis in Archive, Library and Museum Studies.

This master’s thesis looks at discourses that use the pronoun ”hen”. The media debate in Sweden over this pronoun in 2012 started in connection with the publishing of a children’s picture book: Kivi och monsterhund, by Jesper Lundqvist and Bettina Jansson. The essay investigates how eight librarians, who take an interest in and work with gender issues, talk about the pronoun hen and about this picture book and other books that have characters which are not named as a sex/gender. The essay takes a discursive perspective on reality and on the construction of knowledge and carries out a discourse analysis of the librarians’ talk in the qualitative interviews that were made for this study. In the analysis of these interviews Yvonne Hirdman’s theory of the gender system takes a central part. The result of the analysis is seven discourses that are central to the librarians talk about books and gender and where the pronoun hen is a focus or a related issue. The essay argues that gender categorization is a dominant discourse in our western society and that certain uses of the pronoun hen, especially the discourse named as the Human-discourse, challenges this domination. The discourses that most librarians used were within the reasoning of the dominant discourse of gender categorization. A conclusion is that the meaning of the pronoun hen is not determined by any one discourse but that there may be a political intervention working towards integrating the pronoun hen into the dominant discourse of gender categorization and thereby neutralising the pronoun.

This master thesis is based on the sociocultural perspective. A qualitative research study was conducted to investigate children's attitudes towards reading, texts and libraries. The theoretical background is constituted by ideas from the new sociology of childhood, literacy-studies and reader-response theory. The study was conducted with 23 children, 13 girls and 10 boys, participating in focus groups. The results of the study reveal that children's literacy-activities in school are strongly influenced and limited by adults. Children's interest in pictures and non-fiction-reading do not correspond to the school institution that favors traditional media and fiction. The study also reveals a gender division between children's literacy-activities that tends to grow with age. All the children in the study regard libraries as book-houses and wished for libraries that combine activity and serenity. The thesis shows the importance of being aware of, and engage in, children's reading-interests and reading-practices if the reading stimulating activities in schools and libraries are to be successful. The study also shows that an integration of new media in the school and in the library is necessary if children's reading skills are to be improved.

This master thesis constitutes a study into the history of reading. The object is to illustrate how reading practices of a few girls and young women were molded during the early decades of the twentieth century. By studying how reading was expressed in a specific historical situation, the prerequisites and changes of reading can be understood as part of a wider historical perspective. The primary material consists of 33 retrospective interviews that were recorded during the 1970s and 80s, wherein female respondents articulate their recollections of books and reading in their childhood and adolescent. The theoretical framework draws inspiration from the field of the history of reading, with influence from scholars such as Roger Chartier and Robert Darnton. The comprehension is that reading practices are shaped and limited by social and cultural factors, but the practices are also shaped by the liberties readers take within the prevailing limitations. The analysis shows that the home environment played a decisive role when it comes to the prerequisites for reading, and is closely intertwined with factors such as the parents' level of education, occupations and financial assets. As many homes suffered from a lack of reading material, the libraries connected to schools, religious communities or popular movements became valuable sources. Public education efforts, such as the emergence of public libraries and the spread of new, cheaper reading materials, had great significance for many of the girls, and made reading more varied and free. The overall picture shows that reading practices varied between different individuals. Different modalities of reading are closely intertwined with distinct individual prerequisites and the various opportunities which allowed the respondents to be active readers and tailor their reading practices to meet their own specific needs.

Introduction. This thesis examines how the school librarian’s work affects pupils’ reading and their interest in literature. The aim is to identify how pupils’ interest and commitment to a new book genre differs based on the level of interference from the school librarian during the presentations of this genre. Method. We have introduced new books in a new genre for pupils in a primary school in central Sweden. Our study is based on action research where we knowingly influenced the participating pupils to different extents, and examined the results of this influence. By applying a user’s perspective, we studied the pupils during their visits to the school library, held focus groups with a few pupils from each class, and gathered statistics of books being lent from the school library. Analysis. The analytical framework for this thesis combines theory from the sociocultural perspective with conceptions regarding reading strategies. Results. Our results show that the level of interference from the school librarian affected the pupils’ interest in the new book genre to a high extent. Pupils that did not have an interest in the subject beforehand gained a bigger engagement for it by reading books in the genre after the school librarian’s presentation. The pupils' interest in the new books also rose during the focus groups when they got more information about the books. Conclusion. Since the study clearly presents what difference an active school librarian’s work makes for the pupils’ reading motivation, it shows the great importance of having an educated librarian in every school library. This is a two years master’s thesis in Library and Information Science.