“It’s the democracy that is in common” : A comparative qualitative content analysis of the Swedish National Library Strategy and the Swedish National Security Strategy

This thesis examines the correlation between the Swedish National Library Strategy and the Swedish National Security Strategy. These strategies originates from two different political fields that seemingly has nothing to do with each other. However, in the Swedish National Library Strategy, it states that public libraries in Sweden should be a part of the nation’s civil defense, and therefore be a part of Sweden’s total defense system. In the National Library Strategy, libraries are considered vital in order to sustain a strong democracy, this is described through the libraries focus on educating citizens in media and information literacy (MIL), as well as the librarians role as an independent and neutral information intermediary. Libraries would therefore enrich the civil defense through a crisis, or a wartime situation. However, in the National Security Strategy the vital role of public libraries within the defense system is not being discussed. The statement from the National Library Strategy has been met with a lot of questions and dispute. The reactions of the statement is in fact the premise of this thesis. The subsequent ignorance of the statement requires further knowledge, which this thesis establish. A comparative qualitative content analysis is applied to find similarities and differences between the two political fields, in order to understand the statement made in the Swedish National Library Strategy. The source material of this thesis consists of these two strategies, as well as further selected reports and research papers that is linked to the two strategies. The results of this thesis show that there is a communal discussion about threat scenarios, and that there are a mutual goal of a strong upheld democracy in both of the policies. However, the results show that there are differences in how to encounter and overcome the threats. This is a two years master’s thesis in Library and Information Science