The Book That Never Ends A survey of the selection and acquisition of cultural magazines at public libraries.

The purpose of this Masters Thesis is to explore the process of selection that librarians face when selecting and acquiring cultural magazines to public libraries. The methods used are qualitative interviews and literary studies. A brief review is given of acquisition policies at public libraries and of cultural magazines and the important role they play in public libraries. Five interviews have been made at five public libraries to find out what factors affect the process of selection when it comes to cultural magazines. Two theories are used as a basis for the analysis of the result of the interviews and literary studies. These theories are canon and identity theory which are based on the idea of socialconstructivism. The tendencies we can see from our study are that there are three main factors affecting the libraries in their process of selecting which cultural magazines they should purchase. These three factors are: the library finances, wishes of the library users and the responsible librarians own opinions. Neither of the interviewed libraries wanted to give a definition of a cultural magazine, they did not want to separate cultural magazines from ordinary magazines. Cultural magazines are important for the identity of the library. These magazines are tools that libraries can use to establish a wide range of subjects and variations of opinions in their medium collection.Uppsatsnivå: