Bibliotecas públicas e escolares da cidade de Cornélio Procópio - PR : desafios dos mediadores de leitura para a formação de leitores

Abstract

This study is the result of an investigation about the role played by reading mediators that are settled in public libraries and school libraries in the city of Cornélio Procópio, located in the North of Paraná, bringing to the center of discussion the importance of this space as a place of readers' formation. The hypothesis of this work was that, in libraries, the practices of reading development, in general, and literary development, specifically, occur in a scattered and often intuitive way. From a pilot study, conducted through the application of 20 questionnaires, both in public libraries and in school libraries, we detected a number of factors that hinder the work of reading mediators, as far as it concerns the democratization of access, reading promotion and formation of readers. Through the theoretical apparatus of the Sociology of Reading, we sought to extend the analysis to all state, private, municipal and public libraries of the city of Cornélio Procópio, with the goal of understanding the reality experienced by the city, with regard to whether or not there is a positive promotion of reading practices in these institutions, as well as understanding if the challenges faced by professionals of libraries come from the social environment in which they live, the lack of theoretical basis that lead them to intuitive practice, and/or failure of public policies and the incipient systematization of knowledge of the work being developed in the libraries. To make the research concrete, we conducted a study on the reader's view throughout history, on how this has become to be understood by the Sociology of Reading and by the reception theories, and on the importance of the mediator instance, more specifically, the library, and of the reading mediators in this paradigm shift. Likewise, we presented governmental programs and actions designed to promote reading in Brazil, in order to understand if indeed those measures bolster the mediators in their functions. The calculation of results showed that, among other difficulties, in all institutions analyzed, only a small number of mediators perform positive systematized reading practices. The works are made intuitively, since library professionals are unaware of the existence of public policies in municipal, state or federal level to assist them in their work. Also, the greatest challenges are experienced by libraries that depend on the city as a managing body of financial and human resources to support the exercise of the readers' formation.