Examensarbete.

The Swedish institute of racial biology was the first of its kind in the world. The purpose of their activity was to gather information about the different kind of racial characters of the Swedish population. They did this by traveling around the country gathering pictures and statistic information. In 1958 it was decided that the institute was going to get integrated with the University of Uppsala and change its research focus to a more medical genetic. Most of the research material also got integrated into the university’s library.The purpose of this paper is to find out how the institutes collection has been handled through the ages and if there have been any controversy or debate about it. To put it in perspective I also want to see how the University of Uppsala handles other sensitive materials in their collection.The collection has always been open to everyone who wanted to take part of its content. But the documentation of the collections handling has been poor and quite a big part of the collection has been lost, for unknown reasons. The only part of it that has been restricted is the material that contains pictures of naked children. These restrictions were set just a few years ago by Uppsala University, and they are almost ineffective since the librarians have no means to uphold them.There seems to be a lack of discussion about the handling of material of a sensitive nature on behalf of the librarian community. Since there apparently needs to be some sort of restrictions towards some material in the libraries collections, this restrictions need to be discussed so they get the desired effects. / Program: Bibliotekarie

Univ., Diss.--Uppsala, 2002.