This thesis is the result of a questionnaire survey amongsmall businesses in the municipality of Övertorneå. Smallbusinesses need access to many different kinds of informationduring day-to-day operations. Since small businesses oftenlack resources like time, staff and money, the public librarycould provide small businesses with information.The aim of this thesis is to study information needs amongsmall businesses in Övertorneå. The study also aims to suggestwhat kind of service the library could provide accordingto the information needs and the most valued informationsources of the businesses. / Uppsatsnivå: C

The purpose of this study is to examine and explain why three Swedish public libraries failedin their ambition to act as information services for small and medium-sized firms (SMF). To support this purpose two major assumptions are made:1) Public libraries who plan to run this kind of "business" must act with the same means as "professional" services.2) The service must be adjusted to the information needs of the customer.Based on these assumptions sixteen factors which are crucial to the "success" for this kind of service are presented.Applied to the information services of Lidkoping, Sölvesborg and Västervik, these factors reveal a number of shortcomings and mistakes made by the libraries.To understand this result these information services are seen as parts of a traditional Swedish public "library-thought". It is shown that, fundamental ideas in the way the public libraries are defined, like the responsibility to act in a neutral and democratic way, also characterised the three information services.These ideas together with the opinion of SMF as a "rational" information-consumer resulted in information services who did not meet the information-needs and information-behaviour of SMF.