What does läsfrämjande, the Swedish word for reading promotion mean? : A qualitative study of the term läsfrämjande and its narrative construction in Swedish public libraries.

The aim of this master thesis is to examine the Swedish term for reading promotion, läsfrämjande, and gain a greater understanding for the meanings inherent in the word. To do this, narrative theory in the form if Harding's typology of six different types of narratives arranged on a scale from general to particular has been used for the analysis.The study focuses on librarians that work with children and young adults in public libraries and their rela-tionships with reading promotion. On the surface the Swedish word for reading promotion is simple, but exam-ined closely it becomes apparent that it is in fact multifaceted. The word consists of many different narratives that interact and in different ways change and affect each other. This study has identified five different types of collective narratives connected to the word läsfrämjande. These are the democratic narrative, the narrative of qualitative litterateur, reading for the soul, the enabling narrative and the literacy narrative. Together with the other types of narratives these form the basis of the personal narrative the librarians form around their reading promotion work and the word läsfrämjande.The personal narrative connected to the word will always be unique to the individual librarian, and it is be-cause of this that the word is so hard to define. The meaning will differ in small ways between different people, but because the personal narratives are built from the same collective narratives there will appear to be consensus in the meaning.This study has been produced as a two years master’s thesis in Library and Information Science