”We shouldn’t fight but cooperate” : A case study of collaboration within reading promotional work directed to children and youth

The aim of this master’s thesis is to examine how collaboration is represented in guiding documents and practice concerning reading promotional work towards children and youth within Sandviken’s cultural center’s public library and the house of literature. This is examined through a case study of the public library’s and the house of literature’s activities for children and youth, with a focus on how collaboration affects the organizations work towards these target groups. The empirical material consists of legal texts from national, regional and municipal levels, documents, and guidelines for the two organizations, as well as qualitative interviews with librarians and activity developers within the library and house of literature’s practices. The empirical material is analyzed with the use of Kajsa Lindberg’s organizational definition of collaboration and focuses on how collaboration is perceived, motivated, what unifying objects that exist between different professions and which promoting and inhibitory aspects that can be identified. The analysis shows that motives behind collaboration often involve different categories of motives at once and that they synergize with one another. Librarians and developers experience collaboration as more fruitful when sprung from practice rather than from directives stated in documents. However, the result from this thesis indicates that the documents have a valuable function in putting collaboration on the agenda within public libraries and making decisions to establish and invest in such activities more legitimate. The results further indicate that the organizations within the case have promoting prerequisites that are specific for their local context such as engaged politicians and a strong local cultural tradition, but that the benefits that can be identified in some measures can be achieved elsewhere using the prerequisites at hand. This is a two years master’s thesis in Library and Information science