Folkbibliotekets roll på landsbygden och i staden
The purpose of this master?s thesis is to examine whether the role of a public library in a rural community is different from that of a town library. To answer this, a case studie of two public libraries has been made. Interviews, collection of documents and observations were carried out on location in one public library located in a rural area, and one public library, situated in a town. A modified version of an analysis model, originally developed by Andersson and Skot-Hansen, was used to analyse the data. Andersson?s and Skot-Hansen?s model is designed to categorize the roles of the public library as (1) a cultural centre (2) a knowledge centre (3) an information centre, and (4) a social centre. The analytical findings show that the rural library examined in this study clearly possess all of the roles of the model, while the town library of this study is more distinct in the roles of being information centre and knowledge centre. The remaining two roles does appear in the sample, but not to the same extent. The results also show that the roles a public library takes on does not solely depend on the surroundings being rural or urbanized, but on many other circumstances as well. Some other determinants are the character of the municipality, and organizational issues such as management of both the municipality and the library.