“Money makes the world go around” – fee‐based services in Danish public libraries 2000‐2003

This paper contains some of the main results of a recent 2003 Danish qualitative survey on opinions and experiences of fee‐based services among public libraries. Current considerations and reflections are reviewed, experiences with specific public library products and services and customers segments analysed and success factors and primary results identified. This study, among others, asserts that the discourse on fee‐based library services has fundamentally changed since the 1970s and that fee‐based services today are more likely to be seen as facilitators of organisational change, human resource development, learning, quality and the like than income and profit generation mechanisms. A balanced view on the effects on organisational culture and the traditional Danish cooperating library system suggests that fee‐based services in certain respects seem to stimulate knowledge sharing.