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Public library managers’ descriptions of political attention

Katarina Michnik (University of Borås, Borås, Sweden)

Library Management

ISSN: 0143-5124

Article publication date: 9 November 2015

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Abstract

Purpose

Public library issues are often described as being of low political priority. Yet circumstances differ for different communities; public library issues may receive varying political attention. The purpose of this paper is to study how Swedish public library managers describe local politicians’ attention to public library issues and to identify which municipal circumstances, such as political organization, population, and finances, seem to matter for how local politicians’ attention is described.

Design/methodology/approach

The empirical data were collected through a web-based questionnaire sent to all public library managers in Sweden. To identify the described political attention, a content analysis was done. A multinominal logistic regression analysis was performed to analyze the municipal circumstances that seem to matter for how political attention is described.

Findings

A small majority of public library managers described the local political attention as strong or quite strong. Three factors seem to matter for how the attention is described: political organization, existence of a library plan, and population size. In the discussion personal factors, such as the politicians’ personal interest and public library managers’ experience, are brought up as possibly being of considerable importance.

Originality/value

Several studies have been conducted on how politicians perceive public libraries; in these studies, the politicians are mainly treated as a unified group. This paper shows that the political approach to public library issues is described as different in different municipal circumstances.

Keywords

Citation

Michnik, K. (2015), "Public library managers’ descriptions of political attention", Library Management, Vol. 36 No. 8/9, pp. 673-684. https://doi.org/10.1108/LM-04-2015-0013

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2015, Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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