“Librarians reflecting upon their needs for an education about the physically challenged visitor to the library : To improve as a librarian through education and create a more accessible library?”

Our main reason for this master thesis is to find out how librarians get knowledge and understanding about people with disabilities in order to make the library more accessible. Our aim is to study the so-called 4 x 4 education which is an education about accessibility to and within cultural institutions and find out if a specific education is helpful to librarians in this matter. We also discuss what librarians themselves find desirable in an education of this type. Socio-cultural perspective is our choice as background theory. The socio-cultural perspective states that learning depends on social activity and social interaction. Knowledge is constructed through the individual’s interaction in a context with other people. We use both a qualitative method, literary studies and interviews with six librarians, as well as a quantitative method including questionnaires sent out to librarians with both checkboxes and open questions. In our thesis we highlight the demand from governmental authorities that public localities be made accessible to people with disabilities in 2010 as well as the demand of The Library Law claiming that all individuals have access to a public library. Our results show that two parts of the education have been highly acclaimed by participants and those were the lectures by disabled lecturers and the fictional situations trying to experience different disabilities. The most effective learning processes clearly turned out to be the ones including social and situated situational learning