| Summary: | The purpose of this thesis is to gain an understanding of whether or not the concepts of users’ need and quality stand in contradiction to one another when public librarians are purchasing fiction literature and if there are any differences between small and large municipalities. Through qualitative interviews we aim to identify how public librarians in Sweden use these concepts in the process of choosing what fiction literature to acquire. We interviewed six librarians responsible for purchasing fiction literature, three from smaller municipalities and three from larger municipalities. We then analyzed with the help of Sanna Taljas theory The Interpretative Repertoires of the Music Library and concepts from earlier research. Instead of repertoires we used the library collection in our analysis model, the general collection, the alternative collection and the demand driven collection. We identified a various amount of values to describe the users’ need and quality, which we placed in our three collections. The results of the study are in line with some of the earlier research we have used in this study, but there are also new interpretations regarding the concept of quality. The idea of what quality entails has obviously gone through a transformation over time and our study shows that quality today is often measured in the context of the reader. We have also identified a number of working methods regarding users’ need and quality that differentiates the smaller municipalities from the larger.
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