The purpose of this thesis is to compare international ideal competencies for Special Collections librarianship to the possibility to acquire these competencies as a student of library education or as a professional librarian with the care of special collections in a public library in Sweden today. The questions posed are: How are international ideal competencies concerning special collections looked upon in Swedish public libraries? How can students or professional librarians today acquire competences necessary for the work at hand in special collections? Suggested in this thesis is to emphasize the importance of understanding that handling special collections demands other skills and belongs to other practices than ordinary work in a public library. The major discrepancy with international ideal competencies consists in the lack of ways for education in the field of special collections for both students and professional librarians in Sweden today.

The aim of my master’s thesis has been to examine the situation of the price lists in the National Library of Sweden, in Uppsala University Library and in the Nordiska Museet Library. The starting point was that the institutes have been operating within different institutional practices. These operational differences between the institutes have affected the collecting, the organizing and the accessibility to the information of the price lists. My master‘s thesis is based on Birger Hjørlands theories of domains and knowledge organization. The main sources of the information in the thesis are interviews conducted with informants within these three institutes. The findings of the study show that the main differences in how the institutes have been organizing the price lists, results from the different assignments the institutes have in collecting the material. Based upon the facts that have emerged in the interviews, some general and some specific problem areas have been highlighted. These problem areas have been discussed in the thesis and possible solutions in how to proceed have been presented.

The thesis investigates how Swedish archives and special collections manage digital information stored on legacy media. The purpose is to understand what strategies and practices archives use when extracting digital information from legacy media. The strategies used to extract and preserve data from legacy media preludes how archives should preserve other born digital information and provides a micro perspective for comprehensive further investigations. The research will increase our understanding of archival practices by looking at the Swedish archives. The thesis uses philosophy of information as a metatheory to frame the investigation, and proceeds to use principles found either in archival litterature or established in previous international research to analyze and compare strategies used by the Swedish archives when extracting data from legacy media. The thesis uses a quantitative method to analyze collected statistical data and a qualitative method to interpret and compare archival strategies. The quantitative results show that while most Swedish archives still have legacy media in their collections, the administrative archives have either prohibited legacy media in new accessions, never really received them in the first place or already migrated the data to electronic archives. However, conversely the results also show that archives with special collections still receive legacy media in their accessions and also experience a small but significant increase in the accession frequency. The difference in accession frequency between the archives is explained in part by the rules governing the accessions, but also by the fact that administrative archives manage records whereas special collections tend to manage documents. The qualitative results show that archives who still manage legacy media, either in their accessions or collections, are still mostly in the process of deciding what strategies and methods to use when extracting data from legacy media.

The aim of this master’s thesis is to examine how social media, specifically Instagram, is utilized in three special collections libraries in Sweden. The intent is to understand why Instagram is a plausible platform for the purpose of showcasing the libraries’ cultural heritage collections, how this is done and who the target audience is. The theoretical framework for this study is based on Roland Barthes’s visual semiotic terms denotation and connotation. The study also applies Lorri Mon’s analytical tools when examining how libraries can use social media in a successful manner. The three selected libraries are Uppsala University Library, Lund University Library and Roggebiblioteket. Six Instagram posts, between October 2018 and Mars 2019, from each library are analyzed, and e-mail interviews have been conducted with the librarians behind the accounts. Finally, the results are compared to showcase their differences and similarities, but also to compare them to previous studies on social media use in libraries. The results show that Instagram is used to display the libraries’ cultural heritage and make the collections more approachable to the general public – specifically to foreign researchers. The librarians also use Instagram as a platform to connect with other cultural heritage institutions and librarians all over the world. Through publishing esthetically pleasing pictures of old historical books, maps and other materials, they want to attract new users and put their library on the map. This is a two years master’s thesis in Library and Information Science.