Därom tvista de lärde : en analys av kvalitetsbegreppet och dess betydelse fö utformandet av bibliotekets inköpspolicy

In public libraries there seems to be an unspoken consensus on what literary quality is. At the same time librarians are always eager to express the opinion that quality lies in the eye of the beholder. Quality is, it is said, something that you don t have to define. But at the same time it s up to everyone to decide what quality means to them. What I have been missing from the discussion in libraries about literary quality is a theoretical awareness about what it means to divide literature into higher and lower spheres. The aim of this Master's thesis has been to show how a theoretical awareness about the term of quality and its impact can be of importance to the public libraries and their attitude towards their book collection. The method I have used has been a literary study combined with a small empirical study, in which I sent out an e-mail asking librarians if they have any definition of quality that they follow when it comes to purchasing fiction to the library. The literary study has had a theoretical emphasis on cultural studies and literary sociology. Here the main names have been Pierre Bourdieu and Herbert Gans, who both discuss the division between high literature and popular literature. Through the comparison between the literary study and the answers I received on my email, the analysis has led to results showing that there is a lack of awareness about the up-todateness of the terms used to describe popular literature or pulp literature. My study has also shown that both librarians and theorists agree on the importance of education and experience when it comes to having the power in deciding what should be seen as high quality or not. This, combined with other results, has made me come the conclusion that librarians have a lot to gain in the way they are handling their purchase policies if they would only take part of the big amount of theoretical studies that have been carried out