Läsning som gör skillnad : bibliotekariers arbete ur ett biblioterapeutiskt perspektiv

Sammanfattning: The term bibliotherapy is well known in several scientific fields as well as among practitioners in the US and in the UK, but in Sweden there seems to be a more modest use of the term as well as presence of practical bibliotherapeutic activity. On the other hand, some of the effects of reading that are commonly associated with bibliotherapy in the scientific literature seems to be similar to the effects often mentioned in connection with the literature mediation that is performed and discussed in Sweden today. Our aim with this master’s thesis is to examine if bibliotherapeutic elements are included in the literature mediation oriented towards caregiving or social work conducted by librarians in Sweden, and if so, how this work can be understood in relation to the profession of librarians. The research questions that are used are the following: How does the definition of bibliotherapy in the research literature relate to the description given by Swedish librarians of their practical work oriented towards caregiving or social work? How is bibliotherapy described in the scientific literature? How do a number of librarians describe their work oriented towards caregiving or social work? Will that work conducted by librarians have any impact on librarians profession in Sweden in the long term, and if so, which ones? In order to answer these questions a triangulatory approach has been used. Starting off with a systematic collection of scientific literature about bibliotherapy further on used in relation to empirical data collected by semi-structured interviews as well as in relation to Andrew Abbotts theoretical framework about professions. Our results show that no standardized definition of the term bibliotherapy exists in the scientific literature and that bibliotherapeutic work can be performed in various ways. None of the librarians in the study are labeling their work as bibliotherapy but all of them are describing the aims and pracital parts of their work in similar ways as bibliotherapeutic practice is described in the scientific literature. The study also reveals a mutual understanding among the librarians of fiction literature as something that can have a powerful impact on the health of readers, in either positive or negative ways. The study suggests that the common resistance among librarians towards emphasizing medical or therapeutic aspects of literature mediation could be handled by developing cooperation between librarians and professionals with other qualifications, so called professions of federation.