Bibliotekariers diversifierade profession : en studie av folkbibliotekariers upplevelser av en yrkesroll i förändring

Sammanfattning: Public libraries have in recent decades been affected by widespread cultural, political and societal changes and there are several opinions about what public libraries’ role in society should be. Three major areas that has largely affected the development of public libraries and thus librarianship are: the academization of the library- and information science educational programs, professionalization of the profession, and new technologies within information and communication practices. The overall intention of this study is to, from a librarian perspective, discuss how various types of change can affect primarily the library profession but also the library as place seeing the two are closely connected. The purpose of this thesis is to examine how public librarians relate to their contemporary and future profession in relation to change within the library. We conducted nine interviews with public librarians in Malmö with the aim to gain a deeper understanding of how public librarians relate to their professional role. The study is based on an example of organizational change within the city of Malmö and focuses on what attitudes towards the approaching changes can be found among librarians. A secondary objective is to examine if librarians share the same view of the profession or if there are different ways to look at librarianship and the future of the profession. We place our study within the field of library- and information science and we use theory of professions as a framework and phenomenological theory as a perspective. Theory of professions serves to more closely examine the characteristics of the library profession, and what knowledge and competences the library profession is made up of. The phenomenological perspective serves to give the study a direction: a focus on the respondent librarians’ experiences and perceptions of their professional role and of change within the profession. The result of this study show that there are different perceptions and experiences of the professional role among librarians in Malmö. There are also different perceptions of change within the profession. The professional role showed to be closely connected to the workplace and thus the librarians portrayed multiple different roles. Regarding the future of the profession, the librarians expressed two major viewpoints that can be seen as contrasting: a more traditional view of the profession and a focus on the library as a meeting place with emphasis on social aspects of the profession. Albeit their different views on future developments, they all share a common understanding of literature promotion, culture, and being advocates of democracy as main values of librarianship.