The Intermediary Function of the Library Room a study of Malmö City Librarys juvenile department

This master thesis in library- and information science is about the intermediary function of the library room from an environment-psychological point of view. Young people are a group in society who often reduce their visits to the library when growing up. There are lots of reasons for this maybe more attractive activities occur outside the library doors, making the young choose not to use the library. But if the library interior is attractive in itself, and has a welcoming atmosphere, there might be a change and the young people may well choose to pay the library a visit. What is important to young people how do they want their library room to look? Our purpose is to see how the physical environment affects young people in libraries. To make our research more concrete we have chosen to take a closer look at the city library of Malmö, and their section for young people. We have chosen to examine the demands and expectations from an environment-psychological point of view as part of the librarys inner intermediary of the users and orderer/designer of the city library of Malmö. To collect our material we have interviewed six young people and three people from the staff, in different positions. To be able to structure the empirical material and the analyses, we constructed themes and in our research we lean against two psychological disciplines: environmental- and social psychology. The most important conclusion we made, is that our respondents have various demands and expectations on the city library of Malmö, that is, the section for young people. It is in everybodys interest to make young people a part of the environmental design.Uppsatsnivå: