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The purpose of this master’s thesis is to find out how free music can be promoted in a meaningful manner towards young people living in an age of streaming and experience-orientation. This is achieved by investigating what music library work consists of, and how music streaming is perceived in relation to this. The investigation consists of qualitative interviews with library personnel working with music at public libraries in Sweden. The results show that there is a democratic reason to keep physical media such as CDs, although they are currently borrowed by a limited audience. This indicates a vacuum in terms of offering music free of charge to the entire population. While licencing commercial streaming services could prove too costly and might be regarded as somewhat superfluous, the interviewees in general seem positive towards libraries offering their own service. A library-specific service would ideally promote local musicians and could according to the author put public libraries on the map in a national as well as international sense. In conclusion suggestions are made to consider the value in keeping physical media by putting them in experience-oriented contexts, for example in involving adolescents in active listening and music discovery; regenerate Demoteket by working with it in a digital context; and focus on reaching adolescents by offering musical instruments and putting music in a context where the adolescents are rather than viewing the music department as exclusively an adult section. There is also reason for putting music in historical, lingual and geographical contexts, something that current streaming services lack. Both the physical space and the web can play important parts in exposing the music collection, which should be used as a means for experiences rather than as a goal in itself.

The aim of this study is to examine the significance of having a music department at the public library in Enköping, and how the organization of the phonograms is handled. The different areas examined are the reason of the reintroduction of a music department, its budget, its users, the work with selection, the marketing, statistical data concerning loans, the work with classification, indexing, and organization of the phonograms and the future of the music department. The empirical material consists of qualitative interviews with staff connected to the music department at the public library in Enköping. For the theoretical frame, Sanna Taljas discourse analysis of music libraries in Finland is used. Talja presents three discourses which all show different views on what kind of material a music library should contain. The first discourse, The General Education Repertoire, advocates that the music library should supply a collection that could serve as educational and represent the history of music and its different genres. The second discourse, The Alternative Repertoire, advocates that the music library should serve as an alternative to the sources of commercial music and offer material with a more alternative character. The third discourse, The Demand Repertoire, advocates that the music library should build its collection based on the users demands and needs. The study shows that all three of the discourses are present when material for the collection is selected, even though The General Education Repertoire and The Demand Repertoire are the two most conspicuous. The study also shows that a music department was reintroduced in the library stock based on things like an interest in the art form as such in the library management. The department has had a positive impact on the library's entire statistics, even though loan figures of phonograms have showed a negative trend since the opening. The figures still remain fairly high so the music department is believed to have a future, even though its future also appears uncertain. When classifying phonograms, judgements made by other libraries regarding the work in question, and different sources on the Internet are helpful tools in the process before making a final decision. The organization of the phonograms on the shelves do not in detail follow their classification. Instead they are organized in more rough divisions in order to make the music department more user-friendly.

The purpose of this Master’s thesis is to study how well the online catalogue of The Music Library of Sweden works when ordinary users are searching for sheet music. The issues studied are: Why do the users fail to find the sheet music they are looking for? Do the users take advantage of the possibilities that the classification codes of the SAB system offer? If not, why? The source material of the study is 144 comments from a user questionnaire about the online catalogue and, in addition, the search log for one day (513 queries). The comments were sorted into seven groups depending on the type of information need, for example searches for certain instrumentation or genres and problems with spelling. Each analysis ends with suggestions for improvements of the catalogue and its instructions. The thesis show, according to the Zipf’s principle of least effort, that sheet music searching in the online catalogue is demanding too much effort and knowledge of the users. Searching with SAB classification codes is too complicated which may be the explanation why only 2 percent of the queries in the log are code searches. In 51 of the 76 cases where users failed to find sheet music the queries would have succeeded if the patrons had used classification codes. The SAB system is thus not used as often as it deserves. The variety and amount of failed queries in the material show that sheet music is difficult to search, for several reasons, for example the complex construction of uniform titles of musical works and that the searchable vocabulary of the online catalogue often differ from the users’ own.

The aim of this study is to examine how work at music departments in public libraries has changed with time. To analyze this, the role of music libraries as well as music library users, selection, holdings, acquisition and technological development have been examined. The examined data consists of qualitative interviews with music librarians and library assistants at public libraries in Sweden. To get a time perspective, handbooks and articles about music departments in libraries have also been analyzed. This study emanates from Sanna Talja’s discourse analysis of music libraries in Finland. In her study of Finnish music libraries she has found three discourses that give the library different roles in society. The first discourse, The General Education Repertoire, states that the role of the music library is to educate the citizens by supplying a broad record collection with “classics” from all kinds of genres. The second discourse, The Alternative Repertoire, states that the role of the library is to be an alternative to commercial music and the record industry by providing alternative music, that can’t be found everywhere. The third discourse, The Demand Repertoire, states that the role of the library is to satisfy the library users’ needs and thus adapt the collection and acquisitions to the local demand. The study shows that all three discourses are present at the public libraries examined in this master’s thesis. My interviewees state that they want to offer a broad collection with all genres represented but they find it also important to provide alternative music that is difficult to find elsewhere. At the same time, a demand repertoire, where the collection is more adapted to users’ wishes and needs, gets more common and librarians have a less critical attitude towards certain genres that were formerly banned at public libraries. The study also shows that work at public libraries has changed a lot with time. The music departments started with only listening service, began later to loan their music collections to the users and now even provide music files that can be downloaded and played on mp3-players. Loan figures of phonograms remain high, but have started to drop, which can partly be due to downloading and the fact that the number of young music library users, such as adolescents, has gone down. The technological development has also changed work at the music library, among other things information research, acquisition and selection. Even though technological development has changed the work and tasks at music libraries, the role of the librarian is still quite the same. An important task still is to search for and provide information even though the strategies and facilities are different.

The purpose of this Master’s thesis is to study how well the online catalogue of The Music Library of Sweden works when ordinary users are searching for sheet music. The issues studied are: Why do the users fail to find the sheet music they are looking for? Do the users take advantage of the possibilities that the classification codes of the SAB system offer? If not, why? The source material of the study is 144 comments from a user questionnaire about the online catalogue and, in addition, the search log for one day (513 queries). The comments were sorted into seven groups depending on the type of information need, for example searches for certain instrumentation or genres and problems with spelling. Each analysis ends with suggestions for improvements of the catalogue and its instructions. The thesis show, according to the Zipf’s principle of least effort, that sheet music searching in the online catalogue is demanding too much effort and knowledge of the users. Searching with SAB classification codes is too complicated which may be the explanation why only 2 percent of the queries in the log are code searches. In 51 of the 76 cases where users failed to find sheet music the queries would have succeeded if the patrons had used classification codes. The SAB system is thus not used as often as it deserves. The variety and amount of failed queries in the material show that sheet music is difficult to search, for several reasons, for example the complex construction of uniform titles of musical works and that the searchable vocabulary of the online catalogue often differ from the users’ own.

The aim of this study is to examine how work at music departments in public libraries has changed with time. To analyze this, the role of music libraries as well as music library users, selection, holdings, acquisition and technological development have been examined. The examined data consists of qualitative interviews with music librarians and library assistants at public libraries in Sweden. To get a time perspective, handbooks and articles about music departments in libraries have also been analyzed. This study emanates from Sanna Talja’s discourse analysis of music libraries in Finland. In her study of Finnish music libraries she has found three discourses that give the library different roles in society. The first discourse, The General Education Repertoire, states that the role of the music library is to educate the citizens by supplying a broad record collection with “classics” from all kinds of genres. The second discourse, The Alternative Repertoire, states that the role of the library is to be an alternative to commercial music and the record industry by providing alternative music, that can’t be found everywhere. The third discourse, The Demand Repertoire, states that the role of the library is to satisfy the library users’ needs and thus adapt the collection and acquisitions to the local demand. The study shows that all three discourses are present at the public libraries examined in this master’s thesis. My interviewees state that they want to offer a broad collection with all genres represented but they find it also important to provide alternative music that is difficult to find elsewhere. At the same time, a demand repertoire, where the collection is more adapted to users’ wishes and needs, gets more common and librarians have a less critical attitude towards certain genres that were formerly banned at public libraries. The study also shows that work at public libraries has changed a lot with time. The music departments started with only listening service, began later to loan their music collections to the users and now even provide music files that can be downloaded and played on mp3-players. Loan figures of phonograms remain high, but have started to drop, which can partly be due to downloading and the fact that the number of young music library users, such as adolescents, has gone down. The technological development has also changed work at the music library, among other things information research, acquisition and selection. Even though technological development has changed the work and tasks at music libraries, the role of the librarian is still quite the same. An important task still is to search for and provide information even though the strategies and facilities are different.