Children's and Young People's Books, Libraries and Librarianship in Iranian Theses and Dissertations

Objective: The purpose of this research is to identify and quantitatively and qualitatively analyze dissertations on books and children's librarianship Methods: This research has provided a quantitative and qualitative report on the content analysis of 379 theses on children's books, libraries, and librarianship from 2015-2022. Results: The Theses are placed in two main categories, "books and genres" with 11 subcategories and "promotion of reading and information service" with nine subcategories. Findings showed that the genres had ups and downs during this period, but the lack of research on picture books and the popular genre, fantasy, among teenagers is disappointing. A large number of dissertations in four fields: Persian language and literature (especially for children's literature), educational sciences (for the effect of books and storytelling on education), Knowledge and Information Science (because of the promotion of reading and information service to children) and foreign languages (with an emphasis on translation methods and language teaching by storytelling) are expected. But the reluctance of librarians to research on storytelling (the most frequent subcategory) and the low number of research on promoting reading, as one of the most important concerns of this field, is alarming. In this research, content analysis and library method has been the most used method due to the nature of literary texts. Also, it seems that obtaining a convincing and unequivocal result in allocating one of the four approaches: problem-based, topic-based, text-based and comparative to theses, requires the critical opinion of children's literature experts. Conclusions: In this research, in addition to a different view in identifying the categories and subcategories of theses, up to three levels, as well as determining the works and authors that have been researched, each of these studies was also examined from the aspects of problem-based, topic-based, text-based and comparative