Offentlighet och sekretess för bibliotek : En diskursanalys av remissförfarandet inför Proposition 1988/89:67

Sammanfattning

In 1989, the Swedish parliament passed a law that made the records of public libraries confidential. Previous to this, all library records were considered to be part of the Swedish principle of public access to official documents. Beginning in 1987 with a letter from a municipality to the government requesting confidentiality for library records, a consultation process was carried out to gather opinions from government agencies and other interested parties. The consultation process resulted in a proposition from the government that rejected confidentiality, but the government ended up changing their stance and a confidentiality bill was passed unanimously by the parliament. This master's thesis examines how the government came to their initial decision to reject confidentiality by studying the opinions of the participants in the consultation process. Working from an analytical model that examines how political proposals result from representations of problems, this master's thesis is able to identify five different representations in favour of confidentiality and one representation in favour of data protection over confidentiality. This last representation is the one that the government chooses to subscribe to and present in their proposition to the parliament. The results of the study are relevant for understanding how the personal integrity of library users are affected by how a political actor represents a problem in order to achieve a certain political solution, and can also be used by practitioners when deciding on regulations that relate to the personal integrity of users.