Time to promote reading : a study of librarians reading promotion work for children with focus on boys reading

The aim of this thesis is to gain knowledge and examine the ways of how librarians work on promoting children’s and especially boys, in the age of 9-12, reading and literacy. The intention has also been to examine the goals in relation to promoting children’s reading and the choices behind the different methods.The research is founded on qualitative semi-structured interviews with five children’s librarians. Aidan Chambers “The Reading Circle” is used as a tool to analyze the different methods and approaches that librarian’s use in their work to promote reading. “The Reading Circle” consists of four themes, “Selection”, “Reading”, “Response” and “the enabling adult”.The results of this study partly show that all of the librarians acknowledge a shortage of primarily time but also money. They believe that the cooperation with schools is of importance and something they wish to expand. The conclusions are that librarians work with reading promotion is time-consuming. In that aspect they feel that they cannot be enabling adults. Another conclusion we found is that they all felt a strong need to be up to date with new research and applying that research to their own work