To create meaning : A Qualitative study of the changed professional identity among hospital librarians as they started a bibliotherapeutic Reading club for sick children

The aim of this Bachelor`s thesis is to examine what librarians who work with a biblioterapeutic method called ”Reading club” at a Swedish children´s hospital, think of their own professional identity. I have collected the data for the thesis with help from qualitative, semi-structured interviews and then analyzed the material I gathered by dividing the answers into different themes. In the analysis I then used the themes to structure my work. I have built my results on the theory in Andrew Abbott’s book The system of professions, about how professions clams jurisdiction in different arenas (1988). The librarians in my study describe that their working place, tools and the way they approach the children and youth at the hospital has changed since they started to work with the Reading club. They can clearly see that the reading sessions bring “KASAM” (which means a sense of coherence) to the children. Now, their most important tool is the book and they see it as if the book itself carries KASAM- potential. They have a close cooperation with the play therapy and have made it from the wards in to the rooms of the sickest children. Even though they describe their work as “bibliotherapeutic” they hesitate to call themselves bibliotherapists. To make distance towards nearby occupations they systematically evaluate their work and develop methods to define themselves and their work