The question of why school librarians still struggle to fully enact the roles defined in Information Power and Empowering Learners may be viewed as a struggle to gain recognition from others that this is what a real school librarian does. Discourse Analysis offers school library research a new theoretical and analytical tool to explore how these roles or identities are created or contested in interactions with others by examining the moment-to-moment talk for the presence of larger meanings, or discourses. Applying a discourse analysis to an exchange that occurred near the end of an ethnographic study of collaborative discourse between a school librarian and a team of second-grade teachers, this study uncovered the presence of several alternative meanings of school librarian in the talk, or discourse, of the participants, including the stereotypical shhhh librarian or story lady. Discourse analysis foregrounds the ongoing struggle by school librarians to implement new roles and new standards
