The public libraries mediation of Internet resources : An investigation of two multi- cultural link collections.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to investigate the role of link collections in Swedish public libraries mediation of Internet resources. The study is focusing on the effects on the contents and the structure in the link collections when the target group is immigrant users. This is done through literature studies completed with an examination of two link collections containing multi-cultural and multi-lingual material and qualitative interviews with the two librarians who are in charge of the collections. The major questions raised in this study are: What function do the link collections have for the public libraries? What is the difference in working with traditional, printed material compared to the work with Internet resources? And how are the selection of Internet resources and the structure of the link collections affected when the collection is intended for immigrant users? The main results are that link collections in public libraries can give a concrete form to political guidelines. By constructing link collections, public libraries can offer high quality material presented in a user friendly environment. Many of the quality filters that affect publishing and distribution of printed material dont exist for Internet resources, which stress the importance of source analysis. This is also more complicated when the material is multi-lingual. It is clear that Internet can be of great help in the mediation of multi-cultural material, but to make the link collection user friendly, knowledge of the target group is highly important.Uppsatsnivå: