Digitization of Cultural Heritage : A glimpse into the everyday work of municipal libraries

The purpose of this bachelor´s thesis is to examine how municipal libraries relate to national guidelines pertaining to the digitization of cultural heritage. Though these guidelines presently do not pertain to municipal libraries, we suspect that similar guiding principles will eventually be developed for them in the future as the digitalization of society continues. Our study aims to see to what extent municipal libraries with local heritage collections would be able to adhere to such guidelines should they be implemented. We intend to find this out by examining how the libraries in our study reason around the possibilities and obstacles of digitization, as well as how their reasoning differs from the national guidelines. The material for this study was collected by conducting five qualitative interviews with the librarians primarily responsible for the local heritage collections at five different libraries. The results were then analyzed by using thematic text analysis. The themes used were prominent areas of concern expressed in previous research pertaining to cultural heritage digitization. The four themes are comprised of technical uniformity, economy, copyright and awareness. In addition to thematic text analysis, the results were also examined within the theoretical framework of new institutionalism in order to see how the formal structures of the libraries function, and how they are affected by their surroundings in light of the digitalization of society. The results show that the libraries examined find that the main possibility of digitization is access, and that the biggest obstacle is financial. In general, we can conclude that the municipal libraries in our study would not adequately measure up to the national guidelines if they were to be implemented at the municipal level at this time