Local history collections in public libraries : a study of librarians' attitudes

Local history collections are fairly common among the Swedish public libraries and these collections often contain older or rare material. There are no national policies concerning the preservation of rare books at the public libraries, and the librarians of public libraries may lack that knowledge. The aim of this study is to examine librarians’ attitudes toward their libraries’ local history collections. We interviewed five librarians in the county of Västra Götaland and also made a small observation study of their local history collections. In order to research this we posed the following questions:• Which values of the phenomenon local history collections can be discerned among the examined librarians?• How do the examined librarians state their motives for the local history collection being at the library? • Which views do the examined librarians have on preserving and making the local history collection accessible? We base our analysis on the dichotomies of the cultural heritage ideals of Hazelius and Forsslund, presented by Annika Alzén. To determine what values the librarians have we created three dimensions to sort the librarians' responses in. In our study we found that all the librarians seemed to make accessibility a priority. The aspects of the local history collections that the examined librarians seemed to value the most were genealogical researchers, archives and cultural values. Their motives for the local history collection to be at the library were because the library can reach all kinds of users, and that they had expertise in preserving the materials