Ledarskap på bibliotek En studie av tre högskole- och universitetsbibliotek

Abstract

This essay is about leadership in libraries within the academic world, i.e. leadership in research libraries. To place our survey in a context we begin the theoretical review with a chapter about organisation theory. We dont think its possible to separate the leader from the organisation so we wanted to describe the organisation and its effect on the leadership. The next theoretical section is about leadership research. Different types of organisations and different levels within the organisation require different kinds of leadership. We also describe the academic leadership since the research library is situated in an academic environment. We have done qualitative interviews with nine different leaders at three different libraries, a large older library, a small new library and a specialized library. In order to cover all levels we interviewed the chief librarians in all libraries and then a manager of each level of the hierarchy. Our objective is to understand the managers' views on leadership in general and their own leadership in particular. We want to see how the leadership in academic libraries relates to the academic leadership. We report our results according to the theme guide that we formulated on the basis of what we found in the interview material. The guide contains three main themes: general attitude to leadership, the libraries organisations and the connection to the mother organisation. We complete the essay with a summary and discussion.