The purpose of this study is to investigate how public libraries in Norrbotten provide multilingual media and how the commitment is legitimized. In January 2014 there was a change to the guidelines for the International Library’s service for providing multilingual media. The responsibility for the provision of this service was also changed. The result shows there has been different ways of implementing the guidelines in practice; this has led to inequalities in the local library service.We have assembled data through qualitative interviews with five different public libraries in the north of Sweden. The result has been analyzed thematically based on Dorte Skot-Hansens culture political theory. Our study shows that the way the libraries legitimize their work is basically in the social field with overreaching values as democracy and equality.

The underlying purpose of this study is to investigate how the libraries in Sweden organize and administrate the service of providing literature in other languages than Swedish. The study focuses on the central guiding principles that regulate the provision of multilingual literature and how these guidelines are implemented in to practice at the libraries. As the guidelines are closely connected to the official discourse in Sweden concerning policies targeted towards immigrants, the guidelines will be examined from a perspective of integration politics. To assemble data a survey has been conducted looking into factors such as how the libraries perceive the guidelines, how the libraries do business intelligence and user inquires to reach out to the users of the multilingual media, forms for statistics and method of working. The results points out that the libraries in their work with multilingual media are confronted with three tensions; the first tension is that between the libraries aim to promote equality and freedom for the individual and at the same time to fulfil certain collective interests and goals. The second tension emanates from the fact that the libraries intend both to promote integration within the community of the users of the library, demos, and to promote the fact that the users also enjoy membership in different ethnic communities, ethnos. Thirdly there is an underlying tension between a policy strategy that is general in the sense that all users in principle are involved as recipients and a policy strategy that is targeted as it identifies only members of a certain category of the population as its recipients.

This study explores library discourses on multilingualism. The aim is to illuminate how unequal power relations are reproduced or transformed through these discourses. To examine this, I focus on a report on multilingualism, produced by the National Library of Sweden, included in their work with a national library strategy. The analysis is performed through the theoretical lens of discourse theory, inspired by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, in combination with an adapted version of Richard Ruiz’s orientations to language planning. Two discourses are identified: ”the old multilingualism”-discourse and ”the new multilingualism”-discourse. I argue that these two discourses are compatible, though constructed as a binary opposition. ”The old multilingualism”-discourse is related to national minorities, rest on a language-as-right orientation and is recognised as an individual resource. ”The new multilingualism”-discourse, which is the dominant discourse, is related to immigrants and constructed as something new. It is drawing on a deficit discourse, aiming at assimilation, and thereby reproduces unequal power relations. At the same time multilingualism is recognised as a societal resource that should be promoted. This thesis partake in a discussion on diversity within Library and Information Science.