Mångkulturell bibliotekariekompetens - En litteraturstudie och intervjuer med bibliotekarier och chefer vid Malmö stadsbibliotek.

The title of this Master´s thesis is Multicultural librarian competence - a literature study and interwievs with librarians and managers in Malmö Public Library. Every fifth Swede is born abroad or has at least one parent who are. The migration flows of today reach out longer, there are more efficent ways of communication and travel. This has made previously ethnic homogeneous populations as the swedish more and more hetergeneous. Library services to inmigrant users started out as a specially directed activities. The political view of migration has changed over the years and the current perspective is the one of mutual integration and cultural diversity. The local governments, who are principales of the public libraries, also urge them to work with this questions. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how the public library look at their part in an multicultural society. Through looking into what kind of competence they think they need I want to investigate the conception of multiculturalism and diversity in libraries. I have used a hermeneutic method, reflexive interpretation. Social construction form an important theoretical basis both for the interpretation of the interviews as for the approach towards diversity itself. The result of the literature study shows that there are, depending of place, time and context many ways of looking at multiculturalism in libraries, the main headlines are: The library supports integration, the library as a cultural livingroom, the libray and worldpeace and diversity creates added value. The result from Malmö Public Library shows that there are, at the moment, no such thing as multicultural library competence. The things that exist are a demand for better language skills and a staff composition that better match the one of the population. There is a standpoint of treating everbody alike, expressed by a ?The customer in the center? perspective. As to cultural and ethnic factors above all the point is to not be discriminating and therefore try to ignore this elements. In contrast the library has an experience of specially directed services to inmigrant groups and a viewpoint of that inmigrants can be helped in their integration by using the library