Digitala bibliotek i kulturpolitiken Om idéer och legitimitet.

Sammanfattning: The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine ideas used to legitimate Swedish digital libraries, with a focus on the cultural heritage, their relation to cultural policy and an eventual crisis within the latter. Which ideas are linked to digitalisation? How do the arguments for creating digital libraries differ between central actors? How do the digital libraries relate to cultural policy and an eventual legitimacy crisis? These are the questions this thesis seeks to answer. The theoretical starting-point consists of a legitimacy discussion and its connection to Swedish cultural policy. The method used is idea analysis. Three levels of actors are examined: a supranational, a national and a local. Six official documents, one interview and one correspondence, are analysed by usage of ideal types constructed out of a cultural policy context. Ideas linked to the creation of digital libraries in Sweden are examined with the concept of contextual legitimacy. Our conclusions are: there is primarily a democratic perspective linked to digitalisation. There are, however, differences between the three levels. Regarding legitimising ideas a change compared to traditional Swedish cultural policy is visible. The change of the ideas imply that a new reason and new demands culture as solution to economic, social and global problems are linked to cultural institutions, which can result in a legitimacy crisis. A certain correlation regarding ideas does exist between the levels and between the levels and a legitimate cultural policy. According to contextual legitimacy theory such a correlation is necessary for upholding legitimacy. The correlation is not ideal however.