The purpose of this study was to investigate how special education teachers in Elementary school use libraries and how they experience collaboration with the school and public librarians and also how the collaboration might be concretized in the library's activities for the students. To achieve my purpose I conducted interviews with six special education teachers. The result from the interviews showed that the students and the teachers use the library for many different purposes for example book loans and bringing desire to read but also for social training and communication by interacting with the librarians. The result also showed that there were no activities in the library that were just for the special need students. A common thought among the teachers where when the class doesn’t find anything interesting the librarian will because she is the one who knows about the libraries´ materials and has the ability to guide the teachers and students through the information load. Some teachers pointed out that if the librarians had more knowledge about the special need students’ disabilities the library visits could be more effective and collaboration between teacher and the librarian could make the visit better. As a theoretical framework David V. Loertschers teacher taxonomy was used. The teachers in the study most of the time were in the beginning and in the middle of the taxonomy scale, and never reached higher levels. This means that the teachers use and collaborate with the library quite passively.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how librarians who work with young people as their main target group view youth participation in public libraries, in particular inactivities directed to young people. Earlier studies find that young people appreciate libraries, but they also see libraries as more relevant for younger children and not so much for themselves. The research questions are: How do librarians experience working with participation in relation to young people as a target group? What efforts are being made to increase the participation of young people at district libraries? How does communication between librarians and young people work? The empirical material was collected by semistructured interviews with public librarians who work with young people as their main target group. The interviews were analysed using qualitative content analysis together with Roger Hart’s ‘Ladder of children’s participation’, which was modified to better fit the purpose of this thesis. The results show the willingness of librarians to develop youth participation, but also the difficulties of identifying young people’s expectations of the library.