The purpose of this case study is to investigate and analyse the e-book management at a public library. The library organisation was making agreements with a new e-book aggregator in 2019 and hence it is interesting to examine why the library decided to replace the old agreement. Furthermore, the study investigates what differences the new agreement has made for the e-book collection management and the lending service at the library. The empirical material from interviews and document collection was analysed through thematic qualitative content analysis and then analysed from an institutional theory perspective. The study examines how a certain library organisation, as part of an institute, is dealing with new demands and challenges in the field. The essay describes which laws and directions control and impact the e-book management at the public library-organisation investigated. It also maps out the reason behind the shift of e-book providers. The main reason for that was technical difficulties with the e-books and the app. The study also concludes impacts that the shift has made to e-book management and lending at the public library in this case. The shift to a new e-book supplier has led to satisfactions among the interviewed and the e-book lending at the library has increased significantly. There are now fewer technical issues reported to the library concerning the e-books and the number of app users has increased.

In this bachelor thesis, strategies used for collection development in Swedish public libraries are presented. Librarians from four different libraries from cities of different sizes are interviewed about the way they manage acquisitions, users’ requests for books, and other collection development related tasks. Ranganathan’s five laws for libraries, which are his guidelines for how libraries should work, are used in the analysis, where they are compared to the views of the librarians who are interviewed for this study. The results showed that the different librarians used similar tools when building their collections, and that the most prominent thing they all cited as most important to have in mind was the needs of the libraries users.

In 2003 the libraries of ten municipalities in the northern part of Sweden were each given 10 000 (SEK) by the BIN-project to purchase books on demand instead of making inter-library loans. This attempt was called Köpa på efterfrågan (Purchasing on demand). The purpose of this master thesis is to evalutate Köpa på efterfrågan. The results of the evaluation show that the books purchased on demand were quite popular. Almost all the purchased books were non-fictional with most books being bought within the field of medicin. There is also a correspondence between the education held in the participating municipality and which subject the purchased books belonged to. The libraries have all made rather similar purchases regarding subject, with the exception of Robertsfors. The most expensive subject was medicin, both per book and overall. The libraries have mostly bought their books on Internet bookstores due to their low cost and swift delivery. Purchasing on demand entails more benefits than inter-library lending, as it is less expensive, and a book, once bought, is available on the shelf for others to borrow it, although the increase of the library’s collection demands more thorough media-planning.