The Librarian's axiom: did more really come? : A quantitative study about the relationship between Sweden's and Finland's economy and their library usage.

According to The Librarian’s axiom, the library loans and visits will increase when unemployment rates rise. In this bachelor thesis we want to investigate if the axiom was applicable in Sweden and Finland during the years 2008 until 2016. If we can find that TheLibrarian’s axiom can be confirmed, the libraries in Sweden and Finland can have stronger arguments against budget cuts and can prepare for increases in library usage. Furthermore no major studies on this topic have been executed in Scandinavia. The purpose of this study is to test a hypothesis, namely whether there is a connection between the economic situation and the library usage in Sweden and Finland. We also want to study the similarities and differences between the countries and try to explain them. We gathered our empirical data by using and analyzing official statistics from several databases. The variables we examined are physical library visits, loans of paper books, unemployment rates and Gini-coefficient. Our findings are presented in figures which are further analyzed with help of cross tabulations and correlation measures. The results of our study show that there is no strong connection between the library usage and the economic situation in neither Sweden nor Finland. There were little differences between the countries. The connections in Finland were a little bit stronger, but still not strong enough to confirm the axiom. To further explain our findings, there is a need for more research on this topic