Children librarians perceptions of pictures and texts in picturebooks

This thesis investigates children’s librarians’ perspective of picture books in children’s storytimes as well as how they perceive and use the content of picture books in their professional work. New research by Arizpe & Styles (2016) shows how children respond to picture books at a very early age. Their studies describe how children are sophisticated readers of pictures long before they can even read written text. According to this knowledge, this thesis investigates the competence and interest children’s librarians have in working with the story that comes out of the pictures or the texts. The analysis method is qualitative content analysis. The empirical material consists of interviews with four children’s librarians. The theoretical framework draws upon five different possibilities of reading picture books. The implications that can be drawn from this investigation is that the interviewed children’s librarians have more professional literacy and knowledge relating to the story of the text than to the story that comes out of the pictures. In contrast to this implication, this thesis shows an overwhelming interest in pictures by the interviewed children’s librarians but without spatial visual knowledge.