Skolbiblioteket som socialt rum. Om skolbibliotekets placering och utformning.
The aim of this Master's thesis is to explore how the localisation and the design affect the conditions for a school-media centre. A school-media centre is in this study a place where the students seek, find and evaluate information, discuss and exchange ideas. An active place for generating knowledge. The method applied in this study is "Space Syntax Analysis", a quantitative method with visual representation of the results. In the theoretical framework, space is the voids between walls, doors and ceiling, between furniture and bookshelves. Space is the social place where people interact, the interface between architecture and the organisation. A space is integrated when it is in contact with many other spaces and segregated when it is placed with less contact to the others. Syntactic depth is a measure of "steps" from one place to another. I have studied two architecturally different upper secondary schools and their school-media centre, built during various decades. The empirical data consists of plans of schools and their libraries. The plans have been processed in a computer program. The result of the study shows that if the school-media centre is placed in the integrated part of a school it generates a democratic and equal use of the library. When the library is placed more segregated in the building some groups have accessibility while others are discriminated. The school-media centres also showed significant differences regarding to the plans and design. The smaller library with four rooms in a suite was syntactically deep and the design counteracts with the aim of running an active student-oriented school-media centre. The other library was larger, but syntactically more shallow with a lot of possibilities for the students to meet and interact. The study showed that the space supported an active student-oriented school-media centre.