Folkbibliotek och lärcentra
ett pedagogiskt samarbete under utveckling
The main purpose of this Masters thesis is to examine three Swedish librarians views on their role regarding their local learning centre and its adult students. The thesis also tries to find out whether the persons responsible for the local learning centres in these municipalities regard the libraries as a resource in this context and if the municipalities express the importance of such a cooperation in documents. Previous research in information seeking and learning is presented and a survey of lifelong learning, local learning centres and libraries is made. Relevant theories, such as Loertschers taxonomy, Kuhlthaus approaches of library skills instruction and levels of mediation as well as Bruces categories of information literacy, are presented and later used in the analysis. A qualitative method was found to be most appropriate for this study, as the majority of the empirical material has been collected through interviews. A study of documents has also been made. The major findings are that the librarians think their libraries as well as themselves have or could have an active role in the local learning centres activities. They seem to have the ambition of improving the library skills instruction and contributing with their view of information literacy to the students. The persons responsible for the centres all agree there is only advantages with a cooperation, whereas the documents reveal very little about the municipalities opinions. The extent to which the cooperation has occurred seems to vary in the participating municipalities and the most successful kind of cooperation seems to be when the library and the local learning centre are situated in the same building.