This thesis is about the bookmobile service in Sweden of today. The purpose is to examine how the staff motivate the existence of the bookmobile. Other purposes are to study the goals of the service, to describe “daily life” of the bookmobile, examine the changes of the service during the years and discuss possible changes in the future. The study is based on interviews with thirteen staff members from six Swedish communities, of both rural and urban character. The chosen theories are based on an organization theory and a theory about different roles of a public library. The study shows that one distinguishing characteristic of the bookmobile service is its social emphasis. It also shows that the bookmobile’s basic function is to give library service in the form of book borrowing. The activity with bookmobiles justifies on the basis of democracy aspects. The goals are usually informal and have been created by the staff members’ specific work procedures that have been established through the years. This organizational culture influences the service of the bookmobile. One conclusion is that it is desirable that the objective of the bookmobile service will be written and also specified in some way. Another conclusion is that in order to secure its future, the bookmobile needs to develop. In the future the bookmobile service possibly will decrease due to changes within the structure of the population or other reasons. / Uppsatsnivå: D

The aim of this master’s thesis is to investigate a possible connection between the development of mobile library services in Sweden and the development of cultural policy during 1945-2006. Our main question is: is there a connection between the development of the mobile library services in Sweden, as described in Biblioteksbladet, and the development of cultural policy as portrayed by Anders Frenander and Dorte Skot-Hansen? In order to answer this question, we formulated two secondary questions: - How are the mobile library services described in Biblioteksbladet between 1945 and 2006? - Are there any similarities or dissimilarities between the development of the mobile library services and the development cultural policy as described in our theoretical models? If so, in what way? Our study covers the entire time period since the start of the mobile library services in Sweden in the late 1940s. The final year for our investigation is 2006. Our theoretical framework contains Dorte Skot-Hansen’s model of the development of western European cultural policy in the post-war period, and Anders Frenander’s discourse analysis of the Swedish cultural policy during the 20th century. The methodological approach in this study is a descriptive analysis of ideas based on a number of questions, partly based on Skot-Hansen’s model. The result of our investigation shows that there is a tangible relation between the development of the mobile library services and the development of cultural policy. This connection diminishes during the 1980’s, by the time that the cultural practices become more instrumental. / Uppsatsnivå: D

The purpose of this Bachelor thesis is to investigate which rolesthe mobile library has to its users in a small community in Sweden.To reach this purpose I have focused on the following two researchquestions:• Which are the different functions, social, cultural, educational orinformation-based, that the mobile library offers its users andwhich of these are used in reality?• What purposes are there for the mobile library and how it is usedby it’s visitors?To answer these questions I have interviewed four users of amobile library and I have held e-mail interviews with librarians incharge of a mobile library as well as the head of the department ofculture and peoples health in the community. As a base for myanalyse I have also used a pilot study which I performed earlier inthe spring of 2011.My theoretical framework is based on the model of the publiclibrary’s different roles made by Marianne Andersson and DorteSkot-Hansen.The result of this study show’s that a mobile library isn’t verydifferent from a permanently located public library. The fourdifferent functions all exist, wholly or partly, in the mobile library. / Program: Bibliotekarie

This essay is about the mobile library in three communities of a district. Interviews with the help of research questions are used as a data collection method to gather information on how the mobile library works, which possibilities for evolution it has to better satisfy their users’ needs and which place the mobile library occupies in its context to the main library and its branches. As a theoretical background the work of Andersson & Skot-Hansen is used to illuminate the mobile library’s different usages, determined by four centres, the centre of culture, the centre of knowledge, the centre of information and the centre of social interaction. Two of three communities will be buying new bookmobiles for the mobile library in 2018 and with the new equipment the mobile library will be able to offer additional services. The mobile library is no longer only an instrument to deliver books and other media, it grows to a multiroom with multiple opportunities, able to host cultural and educational events while offering digital services, information and a meeting place. Faced with closing down library branches the mobile library is either part of the centralisation process of the main library or part of the decentralisation process of the main library filling its own roll in the work towards its users. As part of the decentralisation process the mobile library is considered a library branch, not stationary but mobile, one of its many advantages in the work to deliver its services directly to users anywhere.