The purpose of this thesis is to examine how librarians in a Swedish public library work with collection management related intellectual freedom and Shoemaker & Vos (2009) gatekeeping levels. Intellectual freedom is the right to express, explore, consider and access ideas and information without restriction. Intellectual freedom is a United Nations human rights. Working with collection management, while trying to offer a variety of information and opinions without violating any societal groups may create ethical work dilemmas for librarians. Although regulated in Swedish legislation and local guidelines as media management plans, there is a risk collection management results in limiting information for the library user. The librarian becomes the gatekeeper; the person standing between information and the users. This empirical material was gathered through semistructured qualitative interviews with librarians in a public library. The Library Manager and one of the librarians at the Freedom of Expression Library (Dawit Isaak-library) were also interviewed for additional perspectives. The empirical material was analyzed using Kurt Lewins (1947) gatekeeping theory and Schoemaker & Vos (2009) different gatekeeping levels as a theoretical analytical framework. The results show that although the meaning of intellectual freedom was known, there was a lack of a common understanding of the concept. The media management plan is not an active guideline and the majority of librarians talked about collection management as a ”gut feeling”. The study shows ”gut feeling” easily results in limitations on an individual level. The study also shows that the gatekeeper role now rests with the user and not the librarian.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hb-27657 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Ugander, Eva |
| Publisher | Högskolan i Borås, Akademin för bibliotek, information, pedagogik och IT |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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