The major aim of the thesis is to describe the networks, relations and marketing of some university libraries and their customers in the year 2000. I illustrate how these issues interact and whether they have changed due to the recent development of technology and if so, how. The thesis is based on interviews with two directors of libraries and two librarians at two different libraries. A small survey with 16 questionnaires has also been performed in order to get a more general view on librarians' opinions in these questions. The thesis mainly shows that the networks in which the respondents take part primarily exist in the library sphere and towards the universities.

Sufficient and accurate search support is a crucial factor for successful information searching on web sites. This thesis evaluates the search support on the second version of the web site studera.nu with particular focus on how the web site meets up to criteria formulated on the basis of theories from research in information seeking and information searching. The evaluation is a preliminary investigation that may serve as a basis for a future more comprehensive evaluation. The four major questions for my thesis have been: 1. In which different ways can a user search? 2.

Although school librarians have an important role to play in high schools helping teachers and students during their education, Swedish school librarians are often considered to end up left out by teachers and head principals due to school librarians vague and unclear professional role in the school. The aim of this thesis is to attempt to study school librarians own apprehensions of their particular professional role in a high school context, and how their professional role is believed to be apprehended by teachers and head principals. The results are based on interviews made with eight school librarians working in different high school libraries in Gothenburg during April 2002. By using phenomenographic method various existing apprehensions of the specific phenomena that the professional role of the school librarian constitutes of are made clear. The aim of the method is not to study what the profession constitutes of, but rather how it is apprehended by the school librarians themselves.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine the view of literature within Swedish governmental cultural policy. The main issue is to discover changes in attitude towards democracy, literature and library by comparing the attitudes in the governmental policy documents from the 1970s with the governmental policy documents from the 1990s. The theoretical starting point is Danish cultural policy researcher Dorte Skot-Hansens theories of the development of cultural policy in the Nordic countries. My method of analysis is a textual one, analysis of ideas and ideology, focusing on the aspect of signification of a text. The study has an effort of analysing the governmental policy in terms of idea and ideology.

The main purpose of this master's thesis is to investigate to what extent municipal politicians govern a selected public library. This means to clarify who determines the direction of the library and its services and in what way. It also involves examining the relationship between library staff and local politicians in the decision-making process. Which decisions are made by the politicians and which are left to the employees? The study is based on an investigation of a public library in a municipality over a period of ten years the 1990s.

This master thesis is a study of a new electronic library reference service-project called Speak instantly to a librarian and the purpose of the thesis is to investigate a new electronic reference service and how the librarians who work with it experience it. This should be seen from an informational society point of view. The study is conducted from two questions: - What needs do the libraries have and how do they argue for the project and the chat-reference service Speak instantly to a librarian? - How do the librarians experience the personal work situation in the new reference service, and its use of chat technology? Together with interviews of a selected group of librarians from the public libraries of Göteborg, Malmö, Nacka and Stockholm, this thesis includes aspects such as the theory of the informational society by Manuel Castells, as well as literary studies of the history of library reference, the development of electronic reference service and the virtual library, and the background and the beginning of the studied project Speak instantly to a librarian. The thesis also contains an overlook of other similar library projects in the United States of America.

The purpose of this master thesis is to examine how librarians/cultural workers act in projects in order to stimulate and promote reading among children and youth in sparsely populated regions in the county of Jämtland during a period of three years, and if/how these projects differ. The examination is based upon the progress of these projects in four of eight communities. Four librarians and two cultural workers have been interviewed in order to get their view of the proceedings of the projects. The results indicate that the four communities all made up plans for three years but in different ways. They mainly collaborated with the school but also with the board of children's health and the preparatory school.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine subject positions of masculinity in the fantasy novels by Michael Moorcock, spanning from the sixties to the present. Questions are: Which positions of masculinity dominate in four fantasy works by Michael Moorcock? How do these positions differ from each other or are there similarities? Do they strengthen or undermine the hegemonic masculinity? How do these positions of masculinity relate to historic configurations of masculinity? In order to find feasible answers to these questions I have used a theoretical and methodological approach rooted in the sociology of literature, mens studies and discourse analysis. Different masculinities are defined as subject positions. The hegemonic masculinity is defined as the image of masculinity that dominate and that every man has to relate to, in one way or another.

This thesis analyses the conditions for subject indexing of fiction by studying the relationship between the nature of fiction and the properties of subject indexing. The analysis is founded on a reading of a recently published Swedish subject headings list and uses a theoretical framework of Adornos theory of modern reason. The study is conducted through a qualitative text analysis in three steps. In the first step the subject headings list is analysed by examining how it provides subject access to fiction by the aspects of form, frame and subject. In the second step of the analysis these aspects of subject access are analysed and discussed by relating them to relevant research of subject indexing of fiction.

The goal of this Masters thesis is to examine how people at the production department of Arkivator Falköping AB perceive the internal organisational communication transfer and exchange of information, by means of a communication audit. The objectives are also to characterise the communication climate and the respondents satisfaction with the internal organisational communication within the organisation. The results of the study are compared with the companys information policy and with previous research in organisational communication. Answers from different demographic groups within the population are compared. The communication audit was conducted using a modified and added version of a questionnaire originally compiled by the International Communications Association.

The purpose of this master thesis is to investigate and analyse how the concept of lifelong learning is expressed in political documents concerning public libraries and education and how it can be related to earlier concepts of education within the discourse of public libraries. Focus is the official approach to the concept of lifelong learning and public library. The documents examined contain the political aims for education and culture policy on a national and local level. The theories used in the study concern the background and meaning of the concept of lifelong learning, they describe public libraries and their earlier perspectives of education and they also give a picture of practices of governing within the framework of public libraries. The purpose is to see how the speech in the documents is reflected in discourses of society and public library.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine the view of funding and sponsorship of culture within Swedish governmental cultural policy. The main issue is to discover changes in attitude towards funding and sponsorship of culture by comparing the discourse of cultural policy in the 1970s with the discourse of cultural policy in the 1990s. The theoretical and methological starting point is Ernesto Laclaus and Chantal Mouffes discourse theory. Another theoretical starting point is Danish cultural policy reasearcher Dorte Skot-Hansens theories of the development of cultural policy in the Nordic countries, and Norman Faircloughs, of critical discourse analysis, theory of the marketization of discourse. Four governmental cultural policy documents, two from the 1970s and two from the 1990s, are analysed through a model loosely based on Laclaus and Mouffes idea of nodalpoints and elements constituting a discourse.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine how two novels written by the Swedish author Pär Lagerkvist have been received by the critics in the Swedish daily press concerning their contemporary anchorage. During the time these novels were published, Pär Lagerkvist, through his authorship, expressed a conception of and an attitude towards contemporary political directions. The first of the two novels, The Hangman, was published in 1933, and the second, The Dwarf, in 1944. A second aim is to examine how the two novels contemporary anchorage is reflected in the reviews. The final aim is to examine whether the criticism differs depending on the ideological view of the newspapers.

The purpose of this Master's thesis was to examine how and what trainee teachers are being taught about information seeking and school libraries related to problem-based teaching method in compulsory school. The questions at issue were: How have trainee teachers learned about information seeking? How have trainee teachers learned about using school libraries? We also wanted to know which education they have got in information seeking and school libraries. We examined this through both literature and empirical studies. We used a qualitative method in order to answer the questions at issue.

The aim of this study is to investigate ordinary readers' evaluation of quality in literature. The main issue is which criteria ordinary grown-up readers use when they are defining their likes and dislikes in literature. The analysis is based upon qualitative interviews with six readers, two men and four women, between 21 and 59 years of age. The study is hermeneutic. Since theoretical works concerning evaluation of literature among ordinary readers are sparse, the philosopher of arts and religion Hugo A.