Vad gör de egentligen? En undersökning av bibliotekariers arbetsuppgifter
We have ourselves met misunderstandings about the tasks of librarians. The general opinion is that librarians are positioned behind the charging desk or are putting books on shelves. Other tasks are invisible and unknown to the public. The aim for this study is to explore the tasks that a selection of Swedish librarians does. The questions we have answered are: what do the librarians themselves claim to work with, which competences are necessary for this job, what does our study show regarding the librarian as generalist or specialist and finally; can the tasks that we find in our study help to understand the conceptions profession and status in relation to librarians. In this study twelve librarians in the south-east of Sweden have kept diary for a week. Six of them are from Public libraries and two each from Hospital, University and Special libraries. When categorizing the tasks we were inspired by the scientist Per-Erik Ellströms taxonomy of describing and analysing professional qualifications, a model we also use in the analysis. We also used two other models to analyse the result: Lena Olssons model of the librarian as a generalist or a specialist and Romulo Enmarks model of the librarys activity. Our result shows that the librarians we have studied report a number of different tasks and barely half of them are of social character, i.e. contact with people. A large part of the tasks are made by routine, such as cataloguing. Our study strengthens the thesis that librarians are generalists.