”Kan du tala om vad som händer?”: Hur sex bibliotekarier upplever sitt arbete gentemot vuxna med intellektuell funktionsnedsättning

Sammanfattning: This thesis focuses on how librarians describe their work towards users with intellectual disabilities which is a priority group in the control documents for the public libraries. These aims for the user group are to be found in The Swedish library Act, Swedish Agency for Accessible Media (MTM) and Swedish Arts Council and they make up the foundation for this study. The aim of this thesis is to gather knowledge about how to get users with intellectual disabilities to get included and feel welcomed in the library. Three main questions were asked: How does the six librarians in our thesis describe their work towards users with intellectual disabilities? Which challenges does the librarians experience? How do the librarians deal with the identified challenges? In this study qualitative interviews were accomplished with librarians from six different public libraries. M. K. Buckland´s Access to Information (in Information and information systems 1991) was partly used as a model to analyze our empiric material. Buckland, who has a long and solid library background in his profession, identifies six types of barriers and how to overcome the challenge of getting access to information. The results show that collection development is a priority for the libraries and also suitable in four of Buckland´s six barriers of access to information. One conclusion is that several librarians in the study felt content with their efforts since they had a good book collection for the user group. Three other factors that had high priority for the librarians were cooperating with external organizations, programs on the library especially suited for the user group and doing outreaching work to get the user group to come the library.