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Funding and governance of library and information services for visually impaired people: international case studies

Part2:Country studies

Sweden

Library and user group data

Visually impaired people: 1 per cent of the population as a whole, 80,000 Print-impaired, inc visually impaired people 4%, 400,000.

Public libraries

According to the Swedish Library law every municipality has to have a public library. Public libraries in the municipalities are run by local authorities and funded with local taxes. The county libraries give advice, co-ordinate interlibrary loans and library development. They are funded by the county council as well as the through government grants.

There is a trend that small units are closed or rather merged with the central library. Many municipalities are building or have built in recent years new main libraries. They are distributed across all parts of Sweden, though there is a trend to concentrate library services in urban areas as people leave the countryside for more densely populated areas. In an international perspective they are well funded but Swedes consider them sometimes under-funded. Funding depends on the political majority in the municipalities as well as the demographic state of the region. The lending of ink-print books has been decreasing but talking book lending has increased. Usage of the reference services has increased as well as the use of databases and internet. Public libraries are well used.

The library law of 1997 was amended in 2005 to stipulate that libraries and local authorities responsible for them should cooperate and that municipalities and county councils should adopt plans for the activities of their libraries. Though this seems obvious, the omission of this wording in the original act was seen to make it rather toothless by the Swedish Library Association, which focused a great deal on the issue of library plans. They argued that these should be based on Unesco’s Public Library Manifesto and School Library Manifesto. The Association defined a plan as “a management document which is guaranteed political support and which comprises an analysis of the collective library needs in a municipality and measures for the fulfilment of those needs.”