Given free rein this might be getting out of hand : A qualitative study about collection development and librarians’ views of their profession

The aim of this bachelor thesis is to investigate how collection development implemented in a changed media landscape affects the professional identity of librarians. The study is based on three questions: Which problems, quandaries or possibilities are librarians experiencing in collection development? What does the idealistic view of collection development look like - and how does it relate to librarians’ actual work? How does all these factors related to collection development affect the profession of librarianship? Former research indicates that collection development is not that uncomplicated, and it discusses all kinds of practical issues. There is though a lack of former research in the relationship between collection development and profession, which is the aim of this investigation taking place in small public libraries in the north of Sweden. To answer our questions six librarians were interviewed in a ”semi-structured” way. In the analysis we applied Roger Säljös construction of the sociocultural theory and related it´s concepts to lines of reasoning in our result. The results and analysis showed that in the current media landscape there are many factors and considerations affecting the collection development process. First there are fundamental documents and policies, written based on the democratic mission of the library and then, because there is a certain ambiguity in the directives, there are the librarians’ interpretations, which sometimes might be based on personal ideologies. All this in combination with failing collection development tools forces the librarians into a certain controlling role