The aim of this Master's thesis is to examine the contemporary educational tasks of the Swedish public library as they manifest in Swedish library journals. Our main question at issue is: Which educational discourses are there? And in relation to our main question: how do the concepts of information literacy, lifelong learning and adult education relate to each other? Is there an antagonism between the public library's duty to supply fiction as opposed to non-fiction? and: What are the consequences of these discourses in the service provided by the library?
Our theoretical starting-point is the discourse theory as proposed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. We analyse 39 texts from four Swedish library journals: Ikoner, bis, DIK-forum and Biblioteksbladet. The analysis is done in two phases. In the first phase we choose the educational terms which are central in our material and analyse the concepts of them. In the next phase we examine the educational discourses.
The results of our analysis show three educational discourses: a user discourse, a librarian discourse and a society discourse. The main difference between the three discourses lies not in what the library should teach or supply. The discourses rather differ in views of how to educate, to what purpose and the concept of the user. This shows that a conflict between fiction and non-fiction does not exist, which is most appearant in the user discourse. The user discourse focuses on the needs of the user and here the task of the librarian is to understand these needs. In the librarian discourse the focus is on the knowledge of the librarian, and the user is sometimes seen as incompetent in relation to the librarian. The librarian discourse often seems to have the purpose to prove the librarian's worth to the information society. In the society discourse the user is neve...
