In the Swedish library law, there is a clause that indicates that every municipality shall have a ‘library plan’. At the time of 2015, approximately a third of the municipalities in Sweden did not. The aim of this thesis is to map out the most important prerequisites for the development of library plans, and what the top managers of the public libraries see as important for the process. The material used for the study consists of interviews with the top managers of public libraries from municipalities with library plans and data collected from all municipalities in Sweden about the resources libraries have. The results of the study shows that municipalities without a library plan spend fewer resources on the public libraries and they have fewer librarians. Lack of time and staff are important problems for the development of library plans, but also insufficient collaboration between different parts of the municipal organization. The most important prerequisites for the development of library plan are interested politicians, enough time and resources allocated, and that the different parts of the municipal organization want to cooperate.

The aim of this thesis is to examine discourses that surround the role of libraries as democratic institutions. This is done by studying the proposal for a National Strategy for Libraries, The Treasure Trove of Democracy. and the reactions to that document in two library journals. The questions asked are the following: how is the democratic role depicted in the proposal for a national library strategy? What were the reactions and what discourses characterized the relationship between the two library journals and the proposal for a national strategy? Are there any lines of conflict or tension within the identified discourses? Four discourses were identified: the library-democracy discourse, the children discourse, the political-administrative discourse and judiciary-argumentative discourse. Three out of the four discourses were present in both the library journals and the proposed strategy except the library- democratic discourse which was only explicitly found in the latter. The results indicate that the tension within the child discourse concerned means rather than objectives. The political-administrative discourse concerned demarcation questions regarding the municipal self-government. The judiciary- argumentative discourse permeated the entire empirical material and was rarely contested. The library-democratic discourse was the only discourse identified which was clearly present in the proposal for a National Strategy for Libraries and not in the two library journals. We suggest that this omission could be explained against the background of that the democratic role often is taken for granted.

The purpose of this bachelor’s thesis is to examine the libraries' view of their own role and its relation to democracy, to identify any obstacles to the library's mission on being an inclusive public space. We do this through a qualitative content analysis, based on intersectional theory, on the proposal for a National Strategy for Libraries, The Treasure Trove of Democracy. We conclude that depictions of libraries and librarianship represented in the empirical material limits the ability to break down discriminatory structures within the institution.

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.