LAM professionals’ roles and attitudes to user participation in Norway and Sweden

Recent studies provide insights into library, archive and museum (LAM) professionals’ attitudes toward user participation, yet they do not address how the diversity of roles LAM professionals assume may influence their attitudes toward participation. The reported findings based on a questionnaire to LAM professionals in Norway and Sweden indicate that user participation is viewed differently depending on how the professionals perceive their roles in relation to those of other professions. Analysis of the underlying relationships between the questionnaire respondents’ perceptions and attitudes identifies three subject positions with associated interpretative repertoires: power sharing, outsourcing and engaging experts. Additional analysis using a four-quadrant model of user engagement that differentiates between bottom-up and top-down approaches and between areas of organizational activity suggests that the respondents primarily see themselves as experts within their respective fields and have yet to relinquish this role in favor of a more bottom-up approach to user participation.