Alla tricks är tillåtna : barnbibliotekariers syn på verksamheten för barn

Sammanfattning: On an overall level this master thesis aims to illustrate the main assignment of the public library regarding activities for children, in the range between educator and culture intermediaries. I´m using the Danish researcher in children´s culture, Beth Juncker, and her perspectives on instrumental culture and autotelic culture to explore where the activities at public libraries belong. Autotelic in this thesis is to be understood as something with an intrinsic value, where the process is what is important and not the outcome. The query that I pose is what aims the public libraries have in its functions and activities for children. And through that, explain whether it can be called instrumental or autotelic and by extension if the public library has a cultural or educational function. I have interviewed six children´s librarians on three different libraries in Skåne and this is the main part of the material. Institutional theory is one of the perspectives that is applied to the material to illustrate what kinds of factors that influence and motivate the public library in its direction regarding its functions for children. The material that has been produced has been organized according to autotelic and instrumental cultures and also by unspoken and expressed levels. The results have shown a dominance of instrumental cultures in the public library even if the material at first glance was interpreted to be autotelic, which shows that expressed and unspoken levels were a fruitful instrument in the analysis. The latest research in Library and information science considering library functions promotes intrinsic and pleasurable activities separated from school goals, but when arguments are used to promote the activities´ importance they are often of an instrumental kind. This results in a certain ambivalence that is also shown by the librarians. With the institutional perspective this ambivalence can be explained by factors such as the long history of educational tradition at the public library, and that instrumental aims continue to characterize the public library even though its political domain and its image has changed a couple of times. According to Juncker´s perspective the public library should be a cultural institution, but to be so, it must promote autotelic culture. Even though the emphasis on different assignments has changed over time, the aim has seemingly always been of an educational kind, irrespective of the institutions political organization, those traditions established early on are often difficult to change, at least on an unspoken level.