The progressive public library?

The economization of public administration and an increased interest in statistics, through requirements of evaluation and measurability, has contributed to the questioning of the public library in modern society. For public librarians this development has contributed to an increased focus on the needs of the library user, combined with an overall practice prioritizing service and marketing. This thesis presents language as fundamental for the understanding of social reality, through the use of language within the frames of discourses, and therefore in the pattern of action that constitutes the institution of the public library. It is consequently, against this background, important for librarians to understand how language that maintains and affects practices of the public library institution is expressed. In order to distinguish the discourse within which the public library institution is constructed, this thesis analyses five interviews from public librarians and the descriptions of their practices and the societal role of the public library. A qualitative research approach is applied and semi-structured interviews and discourse analysis are used as research methods, to collect and analyse the empirical material of this thesis respectively. The analysis is conducted with the support from theoretical tools, consisting of central concepts from the fundamental theories of the thesis; the post-structural perspective and the neo-institutional perspective. The key findings is the dominant discourse and how this constitutes the construction of the public library, based on models from the private sector, and the potential within the institution itself to change this narrative