A qualitative study on collection and collection management at five hospital libraries’ children and youth sections

The main purpose of this thesis was to examine the collection management at five different hospital libraries´ children and youth’s section to discern different roles of the collections. We made qualitative interviews with five hospital librarians. The purpose was also to see how the collection development affected the different roles of the collections. We used two theories. One involves six dimensions of collection development and the other involves the purposes of collections which are divided in to four different roles. The hospital librarians had the users in mind when working with the collections. The users have different needs, not only because they are children and young people but also because they are patients. We could see that many different circumstances had an impact on the collection development, such as limited and narrow spaces, short treatment times for patients and low circulation on children and youth material. The three roles we could distinguish were the Dispensing role, the Advisory role and the Symbolic role. The librarians tried to have a diverse range of materials to satisfy the different needs. The librarians made certain collections visible by different headlines that would appeal to the users. We could see that materials with medical substance were prioritized in many ways. This material is important for both patients and the medical staff. Medical material also justified the patient hospital libraries existence in times when the medical libraries get more and more space.Uppsatsnivå: