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This article presents a discussion of how librarians' engagement in certain social movements manifests itself in public libraries, how librarians justify their engagement with specifically the LGBT + movement and the climate movement and what it might entail in terms of legitimacy.

Besides an extensive international literature on libraries and climate/LGBT + issues, the article draws on data from an interview study with librarians from Denmark and Sweden. Theoretically, the article utilizes the orders of worth framework by French sociologists Boltanski and Thévenot. The framework is used to analyse librarians' justifications for engaging in certain agendas in society.

Active engagement in social and green agendas takes place through strategies of education, efforts to make the cause more visible in the library and by setting an example. Justifications for active engagement in social movement agendas draw on inspirational, civic, projective and green orders of worth (OoW).

Much of the existing research on librarians who engage themselves in either climate issues or in agendas concerning minorities has a normative character. However, this study shows that there is no causal (positive or negative) relation between active engagement in social movements' causes and legitimacy of libraries, but that the justifications for doing so might have an impact on legitimacy.

The article investigates the institutional setup of e-lending in public libraries in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Our point of departure is that e-lending has necessitated new library collaborations between local, regional and national levels, and therefore, institutional e-lending setups have emerged. The study seeks to provide better understanding of how the institutional setups are structured, how governance logics have shaped them and what tensions and dynamics become visible in the key actors’ problematisations of these setups.

The study is situated in the neo-institutional tradition and applies the institutional logics perspective. The research questions are answered by taking a qualitative approach, grounded in an extensive interview study with representatives of libraries, publishers and policy actors in three Scandinavian countries. To provide in-depth insight into e-lending setups, the scope of empirical material is then limited to accounts the central library and policy actors involved in establishing e-lending.

The analysis shows that the e-lending setups are both similar (especially when it comes to financing), and different across Scandinavia, especially when it comes to centralisation and involvement of librarians in this task. The differences are attributed to the influence of different governance logics (question of administrative autonomy, collaboration in the field and existing legal and political frames), and to what extent the digital and market logics are incorporated or rejected in the field.

The study provides new insights into the question of how Scandinavian public libraries face the consequences of the digitalisation of book distribution and consumption by investigating how they organise their e-lending services. This has not been explored before, notably in a comparative perspective.