The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how city libraries maintain the intellectual freedom in their Internet service. The discussion about Internet filters has been quiet in Sweden for several years, so I wanted to see if there had been an increased use of filters. I also wanted to see if the city libraries regulated the Internet service in another way. I sent a survey to 100 libraries and got answer from 83. To explain what intellectual freedom is, I used Stuart Hamilton’s theory about intellectual freedom in the library context. My result was that it had been an increased use of Internet filters but still the use was rather small. Most of the libraries in the study used policies or rules to regulate Internet access on topics like pornography or racism. Most of the libraries also had their computers in an open way, and that could lead to a self censored information seeking for the user. A solution is to have the computers in a more hidden way, so the user could have a more free access to the Internet. My conclusion is that the most libraries did hamper the intellectual freedom with their use of filter, policies and/or the placement of the computers.
Program: Bibliotekarie