Previous research indicates that teachers and school leaders perceive school libraries differently than school librarians. An important reason for this could be that the two groups highlight different sources of information on school libraries. Teachers and school leaders are assumed to prefer daily newspapers and school librarians to prefer governing documents for and reports on school libraries. The aim of this study is therefore to compare how school libraries are depicted in the mentioned sources during the period 2009 – 2023 in Sweden. Two corpora containing approximately 2500 newspaper articles on school libraries and 19 governing documents for and reports on school libraries were created and thematically analysed using the topic modelling algorithm BERTopic.

The major finding concerned the role of school libraries for student learning. Although both corpora included themes on school libraries’ promotion of reading and media and information literacy, the governing documents and reports had a greater emphasis on school libraries as pedagogical resources in classrooms than the newspapers. This theme constituted nearly a third of the text mass in those documents, whereas it was only mentioned sporadically in the newspapers. Applying agenda setting theory, the results indicate that the view on school libraries in the governing documents and reports have some, but somewhat limited, outreach in Swedish daily newspapers. This might have implications for school libraries if, for instance, school leaders rely more on the view on school libraries present in newspapers than in the governing documents and reports when making decisions for school libraries.