This is a study of how multicultural competence is supplied within a centralized purchasing group of librarians in Gothenburg. It is also an investigation in librarians' working methods in purchase of multilingual media and their approaches to multilingual users' needs and demands. The purpose is thus to reach a deeper understanding of these librarians' multicultural competence and their work with multilingual media in relation to user's demand. This since we in prior work experience faced obstacles with the acquisition of multilingual media. This is problematic in a diverse society where all needs and demands should be fulfilled within the public libraries. We based our theory in research regarding multicultural competence, with an approach to the concept as a process that is developing over time. The study is conducted in Gothenburg, we found that the city's primary working method is a centralized purchasing group from different branch libraries. Within this group we made semi-structured interviews to assemble data. These interviews concerned if and how the librarians use multicultural competence in the purchasing group, how they approach and use them in their working methods and strategies, and, if and how, they relate to Gothenburg's districts populations and their demands. We proceeded thus from the librarians' perspective. We found, along the interviews, that the librarians were all multicultural competent but that the working methods in some cases could limit their work. The working methods could also in some cases limit their work to satisfy demand.

The purpose of this master’s thesis is to investigate how librarians approach to the multicultural collection development and which methods they use in providing library materials in minority languages. The questions to be answered are: which methods the libraries use when purchasing library materials in minority languages, how the respondents experience that the minority user groups needs are met in the library and how the multicultural competence of the staff is used in the libraries. For this purpose the qualitative interviews with 6 librarians in Gothenburg are conducted, mainly from the libraries in the immigrant-dense parts of the city, while the study being concentrated on 6 language groups of library users. The study’s theoretical framework is based on theories of multiculturalism, culture, identity and bilingualism. The results of the study reveal the major problems with purchasing library materials in minority languages: the lack of language proficiency, meagre bookmarkets and publishing in some languages along with copyright problems with sound and video recordings. The lack of language proficiency causes cataloguing problems which is why the respondents hope that in the future the purchasing and the cataloguing are going to be provided centrally. The study also reveals insufficient and sporadic consulting of the user communities for the purpose of collection development and the lack of active measures for employing more multilingual staff. The results indicate the need of more substantial involving the ethnic communities into the library services in order to avoid their cultural alienation and segregation.