”Man måste ju tycka om ungdomar” : Bibliotekariers syn på ungdomar och ungdomsverksamhet på folkbiblioteket

Sammanfattning: In the paper we bring up and analyse the attitudes librarianshave towards youth and youth programs in the public library.The purpose is to raise awareness among librarians and tomake the process of change and development. We have usedsemi structured interviews in order to answer our researchquestions and conducted the interviews with five librarians incharge of the youth programs in different public libraries. Inthese interviews we asked about their views on youth as auser group, youth programs and how this affects theiropinions on the roles of the public library. We have also triedto see how the librarian’s opinions differ from how thelibrary runs their youth programs today.We have used two different models as theoretic framework.One of them has defined three different roles of the publiclibrarian and is constructed by Maj Klasson and the other is adeveloped version of Andersson & Skot-Hansen’s classicmodel of the roles of the public library made by Jochumsen,Rasmussen & Skot-Hansen. These models have been used tostructure the analysis of the material gathered from theinterviews.The informants in this paper show a positive attitude towardsyouth as a group and express a wish to make theirexperiences with the public library as good as possible.Overall they are satisfied with the way the youth programs intheir libraries work today but would like to develop it furthergiven more time and resources.