Utvecklingen av det digitala folkbiblioteket - När visionerna liknar verkligheten

Sammanfattning: As the way of communicating and accessing information has changed radically over the past decade so has the way the public libraries operate to reach the citizens. In these times the demands of what a public library should be and offer the visitors have changed. One should have the option to access the digital public library at any given hour of the day, from anywhere in the world and at least have the same possibilities of information as the visitors at the non-digital, "real" library. In this Master's thesis we will analyze and discuss the condition of the Swedish digital public library of today, 2006, and the forward thinking work with the issues of development in this matter. In order to do this we set out to examine the attitude towards the public digital library among the staff at a small number of Swedish public libraries and their supporting institution, the county library. Moreover, the attitudes defined have been compared to the actual status of the services and medias at the public library websites. In conclusion, we have detected a certain standardization of what the digital public library consists of today. All libraries examined have an idea of what the digital public library should be, which is in line with their visions and their mission statements for the development. The visions are often very meager, and the issue is rather the absence of visions than achieving the goals set up by the vision. The absence of visions can be explained by various causes. The public library is very much on their own in the development of their digital issues. There are very little guidelines of what the digital public library should be. The supporting institution, the county libraries, seems to suffer the same problem. There are however examples of libraries with great visions and highly developed e-services as a result of competent staff and good economic resources, but this is mainly concentrated to the larger cities.