Staff reading groups in public libraries : An arena to strengthen literature-pedagogical perspectives

The purpose of this master’s thesis is to examine how librarians perceive the importance of staff reading groups in helping to make fiction more accessible to adult users of public libraries. The study also examines how librarians perceive the learning processes in such groups, and what these learning processes involve and how they appear. The empirical data was acquired via observations of four staff reading groups and interviews with seven public librarians who took part in the groups. In part, the empirical data is interpreted by means of Lena Wilhelmsson’s analytical tool, which deals with changes of perspective within an organised group. The theoretical framework draws on theories regarding social and organisational learning, with an emphasis on interaction and reflection. The observations and interviews show that staff reading groups derive from the need to keep up to date with the enormous range of published books. They also show that the staff reading groups are viewed and appreciated as an arena for learning through exchanges of experience, which in the longer term leads to a wider fiction repertoire, an enhanced critical-analytical approach to the reading of fiction, and a broader understanding of the library user’s needs. In sum, the study shows that depending on the structure of the staff reading groups; in-turn- or dynamic structure, they serve as an aid to librarians by strengthening their literature-pedagogical perspective on literature, and thus making fiction more accessible to adult library users.Uppsatsnivå: