Librarians’ view on education and competence in the perspective of small public libraries

The aim of this thesis is to examine librarians' view on the knowledge and competence required at a small public library and how they look upon their education in retrospect. Library education in the 1970's and 1980's was mainly practical, a vocational training, but since 1995 the education results in an academic degree in Library & Information Science. Due to this, we focus on the ongoing generation shift in Swedish libraries as an aspect of knowledge and education. The empirical study is based on interviews with librarians working in minor public libraries. The informants form two groups, based on their education; “old” ones and “new” ones. The interviews deal with questions concerning librarians' knowledge and competence, the library education and how small public libraries might be affected by the generation shift. Different concepts of knowledge and competence are applied to the empirical material in order to characterize the required knowledge. The result shows that four areas of knowledge are outstanding in importance to both groups of librarians, i.e. information retrieval, social skills, literary knowledge and general knowledge. The two groups differ in how they describe and value their education. Older education is valued as more relevant than the new one to these librarians. Whilst the newly educated librarians stress information as a theme for their education, the older generation was trained to mediate culture. In the future, information is supposed to be emphasized at the expense of literature exchange and outreach library activities.Uppsatsnivå: