This master thesis’s in Library and Information Science examines texts from “Barnbokskatalogen”, a catalogue that primely presents children's books but also contains texts promoting reading. The aim is to critically examine reading as a social practice in these texts, where the aspect of power is the foundation of the analysis. This master’s thesis draws upon the theories of Norman Fairclough and uses Fairclough’s methods of critical discourse analysis. The reading practices constructed in the analyzed texts are mostly associated with idealistic values, expressed with an authoritarian voice where the author of the text is positioned as an initiator of the reading practice. This makes a closed and excluding reading practice in the texts. This is unfortunate when the library should undermine its power in the cultural field to include as many groups as possible in its practices, and not only those social groups where a cultural capital is an important part of the group’s identity. The most open practice, which is found in the texts, is reading as a personal experience.

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.

The purpose of this two years master´s thesis in Archive, Library and Information Museum science is to examine the ideas about children and childhood which have an influence on the storytime at public libraries. The material on which this thesis is based, is a methodbook which is aimed to develop the storytimes and those picture books that are recommend in the methodbook. The theoretical points of departure are discourse analysis and childhood sociology. The concepts of being and becoming are frequently used when analyzing the methodbook. Other theoretical points of departure are the combination of narratologi, semiotics and hermeneutics, which are also used when analyzing the picture books. The result indicates that the storytime, recommended in the methodbook, is based on the idea of a timeless culture of childhood - where the "modern child" including the media used today - is left out. Concepts as nostalgia and pedagogy are tightly connected. The childhood as it appears in the storytime is a locked pedagogical room.

The purpose of this thesis is to gain insight into children`s voluntary reading in their spare time. I have focused on printed books and none of the digitally published Medias. I want to examine how children experience the power adult`s exercise over their chose of books and also why they choose the books they do. The method of this study is qualitative with interviews of six 10 years old children. I conducted the interviews detachedly and I have used two different point of view for my study; Aidan Chamber`s ”Reading Circle” and Barbro Johanssons opinions if children`s participation in terms of their voluntarily book selection.I have also studied other researchers and author´s writings about literacy, children´s reading habits, adults´ attitudes to children´s reading and children´s passion for reading.During my study it became clear that children who like to read prefer to read detective stories for children, a result that also earlier investigations reached. / Program: Bibliotekarie

This master's thesis in Library and Information Science examines how the genre division of the horror fictionis constructed at the children and youth department of a library by studying subject headings of the titles.The aim is to examine what is included in the genre, in the two labelings called vampire and nail-biter/spine-chiller, what separates them, and what difference there is between children and youth thrillers/horror fiction. Also the cover designs and how readers portray these books are studied. The study is made in order to develop the knowledge of the genre to help librarians and borrowers. The great popularity of the genre among borrowers and people in general, and the importance of having knowledge of things that borrowers are interested in, are the motivation of performing the study. The method is a case study and conducted with and based on genre theory which shows how a genre is defined, how it can be divided and what conventions there are for the horror fiction in particular. Discourse analysis helps to see in between what frames the thriller is constructed, and how these elements subdivide the genre and influence it and those who encounter it, library borrowers and librarians. Di-scourse analysis also examines the standards of the thriller.The analysis showed that the discourse of horror fiction includes both the expected features, in terms ofgenre conventions, such as ghosts and vampires, and more commonplace such as sisters. The differences and similarities of these parts in the genre were discussed and compared in the light of discourse analysis and genre theory in order to reveal how these constructions might influence the readers and the borrowers. The major conc-lusions of the study is that the encounter between the unexpected and menacing, and the everyday life is what makes the thriller frightening, now as in history, and so it follows its genre conventions. The discourse of the hor-ror fiction standards are difficult to influence by being expected of borrowers and otherwise they are not thrillers. The study has shown that certain subjects recur more often than other which may affect the borrower in its per-ception of the genre. The genre division helps giving the borrower different kinds of frights and experiences. The joint is that the supernatural is present in the whole genre and convey feelings of excitement and fear which is the most important representative of the genre. This is a two years master’s thesis in Archive, Library and Museum studies.

This study examines booktalk, that is, teacher-led group discussions about books for children in a Swedish school. The empirical data comprise 24 hours of videorecorded booktalk in grades 4–7. In total, 40 children (aged 10–14 years) were recorded during 24 sessions. The present approach diverges from previous readerresponse studies in that it draws on authentic data, and in that it examines talk at a micro level, applying an approach from discursive psychology. By focusing on authentic book discussions, the study contributes to the development of readerresponse methods. All eight books applied in the booktalk sessions involved some type of  existential issue: freedom, separation, loyalty, and mortal danger (Chapter 4). Yet, such issues were rarely discussed. An important task of the present thesis was to understand why such issues did not materialise, that is, what did not take place. In Chapter 5, a series of booktalk dilemmas were identified. The booktalk sessions were generally lively and informal. Yet, booktalk as such was often transformed into other local educational projects; e.g. time scheduling, vocabulary lessons or reading aloud exercises. Gender was invoked in all booktalk sessions (Chapter 6). In line with predictions from reader-response theory, progressive texts were, at times, discussed in gender stereotypical ways. The findings also revealed a generational pattern in that the pupils discussed fictive children in less traditional ways than adult characters. The interface between texts and life was invoked in all booktalk sessions (Chapter 7). There was, again, a generational pattern in that children entertained ideas other than those of their teachers concerning legitimate topics in a school context. Also, the discussions revealed a problem of balance between pupils’ privacy, on the one hand, and engaging discussions on texts and life, on the other.

The purpose of this master's thesis is to examine children's communication and interaction during story time at the public library. The aim is also to examine how to develop the story time – in terms of participation and equality – at a specific library. Action research was used as a research strategy and participant observation, log, tutoring and interviews as methods to collect data. Since action research is done on the basis of practice, a significant collaboration with the librarian and the participant children is taking place within this study. Research from the fields of Library and Information Science, Education and Childhood Sociology form the interdisciplinary research area to which this study links. The theoretical framework consists of theory and concepts from the Socio-cultural Perspective, Poststrucuralist Feminism and Childhood Sociology. Furthermore, Inclusion, a child's perspective, as well as context and gender pedagogy are concepts thoroughly integrated in the analysis and discussion of the results. The main results define the communication and interaction during story time in this specific library. The communication between children and the librarian proved to be dynamic and the use of artefacts was an effective way to stimulate this. The analysis of the results of the developmental process of the story time, indicated that the pedagogical approaches and self-reflection were crucial elements for change. The study's main action was to use a standard challenging book during story time. This proved to be effective in enhancing such self-reflection and for the critical discussion about equality issues. The process itself was also thoroughly visualized in the material. In my conclusion I reflect upon the relationship between the appearance of the communication and the story time context, as well as the relationship between the pedagogical approaches and development. This is a two years master's thesis in Archive, Library and Museum studies.

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.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore how politic in the field of children´s and young people´s reading has been formulated and motivated during different periods. The analysis comprises political discussions from three periods: the 1910s discussion about how to promote good and inexpensive reading for pleasure, the 1950s political debate about light entertaining literature and comic books, and the political discussion about decreasing reading ability and reading promotion that followed the impaired Swedish results from PISA 2012. The overall issue for the thesis is how the view of children’s reading and children as readers that is expressed in the political discussions differs from each other, as well as how those differences could be explained in relation to the social and cultural policy context. The method is comparative history analysis. The resource material consists of documents from the Swedish Parliament and government official reports. A theoretical point of departure is the childhood studies research and the concept of children as beings or becomings. The analysis also uses theories about literary value and ideas about the function of reading. One of the findings is that children’s reading during all three periods is of great importance, for the children themselves as well as for the future of society. There are also differences. Over time, the discussion has moved from the question of a material lack of good books to a worry about inability and lack of interest in reading. While the 1910s and the 1950s discussions are about “good” and “bad” or “harmful” literature, the 2010s discussion pay more attention to reading as an activity and view reading in all its aspects as truly positive. It is also possible to see a shift in the debate from a collectivistic focus on public education and the citizen’s cultural progress, to a more individualistic approach that emphasizes participation and different ways to acquire literature. This is a two years master’s thesis in Library and Information Science.

<p>The aim of this two years master’s thesis in library and information science is to study how children and librarians recommend books through the website Barnens bibliotek. In the scope of this aim it also tries to answer the following questions: What qualities in books do children and librarians respectively emphasize when they write book recommendations? How do they formulate the recommendations? And finally, how do their respective recommendations differ?</p><p>To examine these aspects a total of 50 book recommendations were chosen and analysed through an hermeneutic approach. Out of these 50, 30 were written by children and 20 were written by librarians. The recommendations were analysed through Louise Rosenblatt's theoretical framework concerning literary responses combined with Alan C. Purves' och Victoria Rippere's model of literary elements. The theoretical workings of Aidan Chambers were also used for drawing conclusions about how to connect the results of literary responses to everyday library work whether it is in a library or on the Internet.</p><p>The main results were that children turn inwards referring to themselves and their personal feelings when communicating a literary experience, while librarians turn outward communicating a literary content. Both parts do seem clearly aware that they are mediating a literary experience to a third part, which of course is expected of the librarians but a bit unexpected in the case of the children. Both parts refer basically to the same qualities when recommending books, even though they do it in different ways. And finally regarding the formula of writing a book recommendation, librarians tend to keep to a set structure of literary responses while children are more likely to mix the set of literary responses. The results also point to how important it is for library workers to understand the readers to better develop collections and programs that adress and respond to reader’s interests.</p>