This Bachelor's thesis seeks to illuminate the onesided cultural leanings in literary translations in libraries. Through semi-structured interviews it seeks to explore the view of librarians on the possibilities and obstructions in providing library users with literature of a wide cultural spectrum. In particular, this paper focuses on the dominance of Anglo-Saxon literature in comparison to literature from other geographical and cultural areas. The paper relies on the field, symbolic capital, consecration and habitus theories created by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in its attempt to bring light on the workings of translations, marketing and user-requests and their influence on library collections. By comparing the answers from the interviews with these theories it finds that libraries generally try to adapt their collection and modify their purchases of new media to fit their user's requests and needs. It also finds that the users themselves are generally influenced by the media. In other words, while the libraries may try to keep a broad cultural and lingual collection of literature the users do not request non-Anglo-Saxon literature in particular. Therefore it draws the conclusion that more studies are needed on the workings of user requests and on the range of literary translations provided by publishers as well as their exposure in the media.

The aim of this study is to illustrate conceptions held by librarians and library and information scientists about weeding practices of printed books in public libraries. The study has been carried out by performing a series of qualitative interviews with librarians and by study of earlier research relating to the subject of weeding. The results have been analysed by utilizing a textual analysis method called idea and ideology analysis using so called dimensions to analyse and structure the results. The results indicate that weeding at Swedish public libraries is carried out by a mixture of objective and subjective methods, with certain statistical elements. Weeding procedures mainly appears to be legitimized according to what one refers to as knowledge of the local community, although lack of lending are cited from time to time. Weeding is attributed with aesthetic, as well as renewing and instrumental functions, yet a certain emphasis can be discerned towards the renewing function in connection with nonfiction while the other two functions are mainly related to the stock as a whole. Librarians appear to identify considerably more difficulties than possibilities that weeding potentially can bring about. These mainly appear to dwell upon how weeding affect the mixture of fiction in the collections.