Commodify Your Content? An analysis of market practices of Swedish public libraries.

Abstract: This paper examines the market adaptation of Swedish public libraries from a critical theory perspective, to see which forms of market-based funding and activities have been incorporated in the Göteborg, Malmö and Stockholm city libraries. The thesis uses an ideal type analysis, creating a theoretical construct of the archetypical marketized library against which the three libraries can be compared. The funding of a marketized library (1) is not public; and relies on (2) user fees; and (3) private grants and sponsorship. Regarding the activities of a marketized library, (4) the objectives are to maximize the quantity of output, regardless of its content (5) users are approached as “customers” and (6) collections are determined by market criteria and user demand. Library plans, annual programs and annual reports are the material for analysis. The results give a mixed picture. The libraries are all primarily publicly funded. Only the Stockholm library used private sponsorship as a source of funding. However, all three libraries relied rather heavily on user fees and service charges, and they all received private grants in 2006. In terms of the activities, none of the libraries expressed their goals purely in quantitative terms (although the Göteborg library vision was close). The goal assessments indicate libraries preoccupied primarily with numbers, however, trying to increase the quantity of visits and loans much like a book store. Users were in practice often approached as “customers,” but they were not expressly called that in the documents. There were also some market elements in the determination of collections.