Reading promotion and professional identity : An interview study with children’s librarians during the covid-19 pandemic

The aim of this Bachelor’s thesis is to investigate children’s librarians professional identity and its relation to the changes due to the covid-19 crisis. The focus is on reading promotion for children since it is an important part of a children’s librarian’s profession, and because it went through a fast and emence change during the covid-19 crisis. The qualitative interview study consisted of semi-structured interviews to explore the perspectives of five children’s librarians. The expressed experiences of the respondents were categorized theoretically using content analysis. The foundation for the interpretation was the model of Ørom (1993) and Schreiber (2006). The interviews revealed that the children’s librarians professional identities consists of many aspects. The three professional identities that appears most clearly with the respondents before the pandemic are the cultural mediator- and social worker identity (Ørom, 1993) and the experience mediator identity (Schreiber, 2006). The way the children’s librarians describe how they adapted their reading promotion during the covid-19 crisis shows their professional identity in relation to the changes during the pandemic. The interviews revealed that though the respondents were mostly drawn to the same identities as before the pandemic, they were now also drawn to the information mediator identity. The model used was not sufficient to describe the innovation that took place among the interviewed children’s librarians due to the pandemic. I have therefore created a new category that is called the innovative identity, that shows the new thinking and power of initiative that the respondents displayed during the pandemic.