Samhällsservice i kommunala biblioteksplaner

Sammanfattning: In this master’s thesis I examine how services like societal service and citizen service are described and motivated in municipal library plans over time, and how the design of these library plans affects the descriptions of service. Services are in this thesis described as services that members of the municipality needs help with, in order to perform tasks important in their everyday lives. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted these types of services in Swedish public libraries since local re-strictions affected the use and non-use of these services in the library. Previous research show that in Sweden during the pandemic, access to computers in the library was crucial to some visitors in order to pay bills and communicate with authorities. Therefore, it is of interest to study how this phenomenon is portrayed in strategic public library planning, particularly in plans established in the midst of a crisis. The material of the study consists of 22 library plans from 11 different Swedish municipalities. The material is described and analysed through qual-ity content analysis and the perspective of new institutional theory.In the analysis I identify four themes in which services are described and motivated. These themes connect to the documents descriptions of knowledge, (digital) participation, user needs and the library space. The design of the library plans has implications for the description of service and are illustrated through the municipalities different approaches to document revision and the use of references to other documents in the texts.The study also shows that the Swedish library law, which is ruled to be the point of departure in the design of the library plans, has been interpreted differently when describing and motivating these types of services. In some library plans the law hasn’t been interpreted at all, merely mimicked. This is a two years master’s thesis in Library and Information Science.