Eight ninthgraders on public library

The purpose of this Master’s thesis is to investigate the library needs of fourteen-to-fifteen-year-olds. We have limited the investigation to the significance of libraries for the teenagers in their leisure time. Our focus is the public library with a particular reference to the plans for a new local public library with a youth profile in Malmö. With a departure point in the idea that young people’s use and view of libraries is to a large extent depending on factors such as social and cultural background and lifestyle, we chose to do a qualitative interview study with eight teenagers. The theoretical framework is informed by the work of lifestyle researcher Pierre Bourdieu, youth culture researcher Thomas Ziehe and Library and Information Science researchers Henrik Jochumsen and Casper Hvenegaard Rasmussen. In the analysis part of our thesis, we use concepts such as identity, lifestyle and everyday barriers to discern how the young people view and use libraries. We have come to the conclusion that these teenagers’ views on libraries are strongly connected with reading, books and schoolwork. Some of them felt at home in a library but some of them were not really aware of how a library can be used. Factors such as lack of time and lifestyle create barriers that prevent the teenagers from visiting the library. We found that some of the teenagers at issue still want books to be in focus in a library. A few of them do not seem to have an explicit need to participate in culturally creative activities in a library.Uppsatsnivå: