Bildning och/eller fri åsiktsbildning? : En uppsats om pseudovetenskap och vilseledande facklitteratur på folkbibliotek.

Sammanfattning: The aim of this master's thesis is to find out if there is a potential conflict between the mission of swedish publiclibraries to provide knowledge and the principle of objectivity, as well as what this might mean for the libraries'democratic mission. This is done by interviewing librarians working in various public libraries and analysingtheir thoughts on keeping pseudo-scientific or otherwise misleading non-fiction in the libraries' collections andhow this relates to the democratic mission. The analysis is founded on a theoretical discussion about therelationship between knowledge and trust and how to interpret the democratic mission of public libraries. The thesis finds that the interviewed librarians work to ensure both the reliability of non-fiction books in thelibraries' collections and free formation of opinion, but tend to favour the latter if a choice has to be made.Nevertheless, all the interviewed librarians take some measures to prevent the users from being misinformed,although where the line is drawn varies. Lack of subject specific knowledge among the librarians, limitedresouces, the need to be impratial and the question of what qualifies as correct knowledge, are listed as factorsthat make it difficult to keep pseudoscific and misleadning non-fiction out of the collections. The librarians alsosuggest working to increase information literacy among the users as an alternative to engaging in qualityassurance of the books. This is a two years master's thesis in library and informationa science.