Foreign children's and young adult literature : a qualitative study about librarians' thoughts regarding selection and acquisition

The purpose of this Bachelor's thesis is to analyse how librarians approach selection and acquisition of children's and young adult literature written in languages other than Swedish. What aspects do they look at when making their selection and how do they decide that a book lives up to the library's standards if they cannot read the book themselves? In order to answer these research questions a series of telephone interviews were conducted with librarians working in different municipalities. The selection of municipalities to include in the study was based on official statistics depicting the amount of immigrants who moved to each municipality during 2015. The theory used in this study is based on Sanna Talja's study about different attitudes towards the library's collection. The attitudes are referred to as "General Education Repertoire", the "Alternative Repertoire" and the "Demand Repertoire". These attitudes were also used as a framework when analysing the information from my own interviews. The results show that all of the interviewed librarians are eager to fulfil their patron's demands while also staying true to their own ideas of what the library should provide in regards to content, diversity and quality