School leaders’ view on the library : interviews with two principals and two heads of upper secondary school

The purpose of this Bachelor’s thesis was to explore how principals and school administrators work to develop their school libraries. To narrow our area of study we chose to only include gymnasiums run by the municipality and conducted four semi-structured interviews with two principals and two heads of upper secondary school. We formulated two questions: (1) what perceptions of the school library and its functions can be found among our four respondents? And, (2) how do they work with developing the school library? As a theoretical framework we used Loertscher’s taxonomy of the school leader. The results from our interviews indicated that our respondents have a broad view of what role a library can play in the school, but mainly they wanted it to be an information center. How much they sought to develop the library ranged from not at all to very much. It seemed to depend on personal interest, authority, money, time and a librarian’s willingness to cooperate. The librarians and teachers also needed time to improve the cooperation.Program: Bibliotekari