Skolbiblioteket ? definition och användning
en innehållsanalys av gymnasieskolans styrdokument 2012
The purpose of this thesis is to systematically describe and map how authorities define the school library and its function based on the current policy documents for the Swedish upper secondary school. The study is guided by the following questions: ? What dimensions does the school library have according to the explicit definitions, descriptions and requirements? ? What implicit arguments, references and unspoken assumptions about the school library and its role, function and significance can be derived? The study is delimited to the national policy documents, which have been divided into two groups ? structural and teaching focused ? corresponding to the two questions above. Further delimitations have been made to avoid noise and to manage a manual content analysis. Each question required its own analysis tool. The first a dimension-matrix and the second a group of ideal types adapted from models of the public library?s functions. The result shows that the policy documents explicit defines the school library as mainly two dimensional (space and media), but also that other dimensions could be implicated depending on the interpretation of some active verbs. There are several implicit references to the library?s ideal types skills and citizens, but also to the ideal types culture and community parlour. The conclusion is that the implicit expectations makes it possible for the school library to play a greater role then the explicit defining framework require. The defining framework is vague and unstructured and would benefit from an elucidation in order for the statutory requirement for school libraries to have any significance.