In this two year master’s thesis, I examine the views of library and information science (LIS) students at Uppsala University and The Swedish School of Library and Information Science at the University of Borås. As a method for collecting their thoughts on the matter I chose to create a Webb-based survey. By having them answer a 35-question survey I gathered their opinions on the new Swedish library strategy. As a part of the process of writing the new national library strategy the authors have asked the concerned parties to give their opinions on the first draft of the strategy Från ord till handling – på väg mot en nationell biblioteksstrategi [From Words to Action- towards a national library strategy]. In addition to the survey taken by the students I have compiled and analyzed the 82 views sent to the National Library of Sweden by the library community.This master’s thesis has been done to examine if the university students of library and information science is of the same opinion as the rest of the profession concerning topics such as education, children’s learning and minority languages.The results are presented in figures and quotes and then discussed with the help of a theory of professions. By applying this theory it becomes clear that the students of LIS are introduced to the views and norms of the profession early on during their education.

This thesis examines the correlation between the Swedish National Library Strategy and the Swedish National Security Strategy. These strategies originates from two different political fields that seemingly has nothing to do with each other. However, in the Swedish National Library Strategy, it states that public libraries in Sweden should be a part of the nation’s civil defense, and therefore be a part of Sweden’s total defense system. In the National Library Strategy, libraries are considered vital in order to sustain a strong democracy, this is described through the libraries focus on educating citizens in media and information literacy (MIL), as well as the librarians role as an independent and neutral information intermediary. Libraries would therefore enrich the civil defense through a crisis, or a wartime situation. However, in the National Security Strategy the vital role of public libraries within the defense system is not being discussed. The statement from the National Library Strategy has been met with a lot of questions and dispute. The reactions of the statement is in fact the premise of this thesis. The subsequent ignorance of the statement requires further knowledge, which this thesis establish. A comparative qualitative content analysis is applied to find similarities and differences between the two political fields, in order to understand the statement made in the Swedish National Library Strategy. The source material of this thesis consists of these two strategies, as well as further selected reports and research papers that is linked to the two strategies. The results of this thesis show that there is a communal discussion about threat scenarios, and that there are a mutual goal of a strong upheld democracy in both of the policies. However, the results show that there are differences in how to encounter and overcome the threats. This is a two years master’s thesis in Library and Information Science.

In this thesis we explore the idea presented in the Swedish National Library Strategy (2019) to tie the public libraries closer to the nation’s total defense system. The purpose of the study has been to understand which problem this idea was formulated as a solution to and how the suggestion is problematized by information science professionals, using critical discourse analysis methods developed by Carol Bacchi. Our material consists of the finalized National Library Strategy, its first draft from 2018, and the referral responses by various interested parties, as well as interviews with 15 public librarians, library directors, and scholars of information science. We discuss how the psychological defense relates to the librarian’s statutory duty to facilitate citizen participation in deliberative democracy and to counteract misinformation. We also ask how the library professions might be affected by an active involvement in future civil defense efforts. Our results show that the National Library Strategy construes the idea as a security problem by portraying our society as affected by growing political tensions, rapidly spread misinformation, and chaos, making the total defense suggestion into a meaningful solution. In our interviews with information professionals, some respondents viewed the total defense as an extension of their work to advocate democracy and intellectual freedom, whereas others perceived ethical tensions and incongruity between the two missions, referring to traditional library ideals of political neutrality and independence. All respondents based their reflections of the total defense idea on the importance of deliberative democracy and the library’s prominent place in promoting it, but with differing perspectives of its relationship to the total defense system as either problematic or emblematic. Drawing on these results, we argue that a total defense mission is compatible with librarians’ professional ethics and statutory democracy advocacy, as long as libraries can continue to foster free opinion formation and unbiased information evaluation independent from state interests during wartime and times of crisis. This is a two years master's thesis in library and information science.