Interlibrary loans in the digital age : A Phenomenographic study of interlibary loans of e-books in academic libraries

This Master thesis concerns Swedish Academic libraries current lack of ability to offer interlibrary loans of e-books to their primary users. Today it is possible for university-and college libraries primer user to make request of inter library loan for physical books, however, they cannot make such request for e-books. We will argue for that this problem should not be viewed as a simple inconvenience for the users. Our argument will be built on the assumption that access to information is an essential part of a well working democracy, and that libraries therefore should prioritize the question of inter library loans. In our study we have interviewed librarians who is currently working with interlibrary loans and digital media. After that we have interpreted the transcriptions of those interviews with a phenomenographical perspective. Our aim with the study has been to examine how librarians experienced the phenomenon of interlibrary loan of e-books. We have therefore attempted to answer three research question: How do librarians work with inter library loans and which values do they connect to them? What difficulties and possibilities do they see in making inter library loans of e-books possible in the future? How do they view interlibrary loans in the digital era and how do they view the future of inter library loans of e-books? We have found that librarians connect inter library loans with a will of sharing information and that they believe that libraries will have to cooperate to make inter library loans of e-books possible. Furthermore, we have found that our informants believe that interlibrary loans will still be needed in the near future, even though they might become irrelevant in far future due to increase in open access publications. This is a two years master’s thesis in Library and Information Science.