INTE ÄNNU ETT GOTT EXEMPEL : En kvalitativ undersökning av skolbibliotekets ändamålsenlighet med hjälp av metoden grundad teori

Sammanfattning: The inquiry into strengthened school libraries was submitted to the Swedish Minister of Education at the same time as I started to write my thesis. It states the importance of school libraries and calls for an enhanced role of school libraries in education. The Swedish library act and the Swedish school library act calls for equal access to education for all students in Swedish schools. I examine the expedience in successful school libraries. I apply an equivalence perspective and take a closer look at what aspects of successful school libraries determine the key factors to support students in their learning. I use two methods in this thesis. The first one is semi structured interviews. Eight school librarians were interviewed. The other method is grounded theory. I chose my informants from the schools awarded with ”Skolbibliotek i världsklass”, hoping to ensure that my informants work purposefully at successful school libraries. Grounded theory enables me to examine my empirical data in detail, and to read between the lines of the interview transcripts. It offers a creative way to work with and reflect upon my data at the same time as it enables me to stay close to my material. My findings are the seven categories of which my theory consists, and how these relate to each other throughout dimensions constructed by the method of grounded theory. The categories are “Reach out to every pupil”, “The symbolic worth of the school library”, “Foundations”, “Competence”, “Collaboration”, “Equivalence”, and “Persuasion”. They show which school library categories to focus on to support students in their learning. Additionally, one of them is a potentially problematic category which is dependent on the quality of the other categories. When working with my analysis, I also found problems with my initial selection of informants. I chose them because I had certain expectations of the award “Skolbibliotek i världsklass”. I was expecting that all my informants were working fairly similarly. This would ensure that students would have equal access to the school library and the support of the librarian. I chose these informants as I believed they were prime candidates for 'the good example'. But my findings show that they work very differently, especially when it comes to media and information literacy as opposed to promoting reading and literacy. They also work very differently throughout the school organisations to which they belong, this affects the quality of their work an is presented by the categories in my thesis.