This master?s degree thesis stems from the new possibilities that digitization offers preserving and increased public accessibility of our cultural heritage, but also how a lack of co-ordination and standardization may result in short-term projects and lack of quality. The purpose of this thesis is to examine a selection of public libraries? digitization projects. The two questions posed are:How does a selection of public libraries conduct their digitization projects concerning a) goals and objectives, b) execution c) what resources they encompass?How well does their work agree with the recommendations that exists for goals, objectives and execution?To answer the questions interviews were conducted with persons in various ways involved with the digitization projects.

Uppsatsen är en studie av fjärrlåneverksamheten av äldre tryck, med digitalisering som en valmöjlighet. Kontexten är dels utvecklingen av Digitaliseringsprojekt hos bibliotek, dels det användarcentrerade förslaget hos 2010 års fjärrlåneutredning. Som fallstudier beskrivs två bibliotek i Umeå, universitetsbiblioteket och Sveriges depåbibliotek. Utvärderingens centrala fråga är om digitalisering kan vara ett passande alternativ till fjärrlån av äldre tryck, för att stärka användarvänligheten. Problembilden utgår från en frågeställning över tre områden: Hur ser fjärrlånetrafiken av äldre tryck ut? Vilka problematiska aspekter finns det kring fjärrlån? Vilka konsekvenser får ett alternativ som digitalisering?Fjärrlån utgör en mycket liten del av den totala lånesumman, och det äldre trycket av det samma en nästan obetydlig del.

This Masters Degree thesis aims at giving an answer to what underlying ideologies are at work in digitizing our cultural heritage. Other questions to be answered are who are benefiting from a digitized cultural heritage and who are not, and what different opinions about digitizing our cultural heritage can be identified. Two studies are made in this thesis, one of Swedish political documents that concern digitizing our cultural heritage, libraries, museums and archives, and the other one is a study of documentation of three Swedish digitizing projects. In the first study three different, but closely associated ideologies are identified, namely a preserving, b giving access and c a mixture of both, and these are shown in a model. In the second study this model is then used to identify the ideologies of one project from each sector of the so called ABM-sector Archives, Libraries and Museums.

This study is predominantly qualitative. It is also descriptive to a large extent and notoriented towards hypothesis-testing. The study aims at studying what has influenceddigitization of old Swedish dramatical works through the Dramawebben projekt, whilefocusing on the technical solutions. Four different data collection methods have been applied.Interviews and a questionaire with open-ended questions were the two primary tools. Adocument analysis and observations were applied as well.Examples from earlier research to relate to questions about digitization as an institutional andsocietal practice are presented.