| Popis: |
The problem of today’s public librarians is that no one really knows their identity, they try to be everything for everyone, which makes their identity fuzzy and confusing for both librarians but also for the librarian visitors. The purpose of this paper named “A profession in change? A qualitative text analysis of the identity of the public librarians on today’s public libraries”, was to investigate the current identity of the public librarian at the public libraries today in order to have a better understanding of what their identity is. In order to achieve this, a qualitative text analysis – based on Ørom’s and Schreiber’s seven librarian identities – was conducted on online job advertisements. The result showed that the public librarian have nine different identities. In addition to the seven roles, two other roles were found in the job advertisements. It also showed that all seven roles were present in the advertisements and that the so called “culture intermediary” was the most frequent one. When it comes to the qualifications, academic degree was the most important one and was found in all job advertisements, followed by “teamwork”. The result also showed that the public librarian can have many different kinds of titles and that the title “librarian” was the most used one. This result can be due to the fact that the public librarian has many different kinds of identities and that the public libraries are supposed to be for everyone in the society. This is exactly the problem with public libraries. They try to please everyone and by doing so risking to lose their identity as a democratic place for culture and literature. |
