Library use & Reading. Three life stories

The aim of this Master’s thesis is to examine how a person’s library use and reading can change with time. It also examines how different factors in a person’s context or in the life situation can affect these activities. The analysis is based upon qualitative interviews with three persons, two women and one man between 67 and 69 years of age. The study is conducted with tools from the life history-method, and is construed from a hermeneutic viewpoint. The theoretical starting points are Mieke Bal’s theory of narrative and her concepts of narrative elements, Andersson’s and Skot-Hansen’s concepts that illuminates different ways to use the library and also the concepts about different forms of reading that derives from the SKRIN-project. I have had the opportunity to illustrate how a person’s library use and reading habits can change through life. I cannot see that neither library use nor reading habits follows a certain standardized pattern through life; both activities seem to depend on factors in the environment and in the person’s interests. Different factors also seem to have various importances for different persons and do not always influence two persons in a similar way. Library use and reading habits also had various importance for the persons studied in different periods of their lives.Uppsatsnivå: