The purpose of this Masters thesis is to examine how gender patterns are described in the modern picture book. Focus is on the description of men and women and their emotions and living conditions. Do the descriptions follow stereotypes in the form of binary opposites strong/weak, active/passive etc. in which one component of the pair, often associated with masculinity, is privileged or are there examples of breach of normative gender? The analysis is based upon forty of 149 picture Books that are presented in a children's book catalogue published by The Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs Statens kulturråd, in the year of 2000.

The aim with this essay is to look into what literature has been published in 2006 and 2007 for boys between the ages of twelve and sixteen in order to analyse six of the titles. Our two main questions are as follows:?How is the teenage boy depicted in six of these Books? - To what extent is the teenage boy depicted in a gender stereotypical way?.We chose the titles for analysis based on our mapping of the published literature and took into account the authors? gender and age as well as the main themes of the Books. As theoretical base for our analysis we used Marias Nikolajeva?s table of gender stereotypes in literature.

This master thesis is about access to literature translated into Swedish sign language for deaf at the public libraries. It is by now a well-known fact that there is produced very little literature in sign language for deaf. This is so even though the policies for the library nationally and internationally, and the public law for libraries in Sweden says there should be literature available for all groups of disadvantaged people. People who have problem reading ordinary ink Books have the right to get the book adapted into a medium accessible for them. The goal of the Swedish law for disadvantaged says that in 2010 Sweden should be accessible for all irrespective of weather you are deaf or not.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether the high school textbook on religious studies differences in how Christian ethics and in what way it is presented in comparison with the presentation of Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism and it´s ethics. The analyzed material is textBooks from the late 1960s to the 2010s. Due to the survey´s nature the focus is first and foremost the chapters dealing with religious ethical issues and what amount of pages or space the different religions are given in the Books. The results from the textBooks are compared with the curriculum that is or was effective during the time the Books were published. This is done to determine whether there is a clear link between the Books and the guidelines of the curriculum.

The aim of this qualitative study is to examine how users of talking Books perceive the possibility of downloading talking Books from home without visiting the library and how this affects them. Three research questions were formulated:How do talking book users reflect on their library usage?Have the subject's' library usage changed since introduction to the download service?How have users experienced the service?To answer these questions, five semi structured interviews were conducted with five different users of talking Books in Sweden. All subjects were currently using download services which they had gained access to from their local public libraries. In analyzing the interviews, a theory established by Henrik Jochumsen and Casper Hvenegaard Rasmussen in Gør biblioteket en forskel (2000) was used.

The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to investigate how diversity takes shape in children?s picture Books published in Sweden. Twelve picture Books, which touch the aspect of diversity in the categories of gender, ages, culture, nation, ethnicities, language, class, sexuality and functional disorder, were chosen from the Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs catalogue for youth and children?s Books 2006. They have been analysed with the conception of ikonotext and with the theory of Pierre Macherey?s image in the mirror, of how literature reflects the reality of society.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to investigate the factors of children?s voluntarily reading in their spare time. We also want to know if the children choose non-fiction Books for their voluntarily reading. The method as well as the empirical basis of this study is qualitative, with interviews of twenty-eight children in ages between 9 and 12 years. We conducted nine interviews with 3?4 children in each group.

This study is about fourteen-year-old boys, who are not interested in reading. It deals with what thoughts and feelings some boys have around Books, reading and libraries. Further the study investigates the boys' leisure activities and their making of identities. The study is built on interviews among twelve boys in a secondary school. The result is compared to earlier reports and research.

The main purpose of this study is to investigate in what ways librarians and schoolteachers can co-operate and combine their professional skills in order to help and motivate children with reading and writing disabilities, and how audio Books can be useful in this work. The main source of information is interviews with teachers from ten schools in the province of Scania, southern Sweden. Those teachers, their schools and their local libraries all took part in a project spanning from 1993 to 1996, aiming at increasing the use of audio Books in combination with the corresponding printed versions in work regarding the here addressed problem. This study was made with a qualitative empirical method supported by a normative theory belonging to the new institutional theory school. There are no statistical conclusions in the report.

The purpose of this thesis was to explore the phenomenon called bookcrossing. To fulfill this I have asked the following research questions: Why do people participate in bookcrossing?What functions do Books have for bookcrossers? The method used is qualitative, semi structured interviews. Four active bookcrossers have been interviewed. These interviews revealed that bookcrossing as an activity in a medium sized town is very small.

My curiosity concerning what pupils read and write during leisure time led me to gather information using a quantative method. The study's aim is to investigate which reading and writing habits they have during their time outside school. A comparison was done of pupils at school year level 3 and level 4 in two different schools with the intention of investigating the influence of social background on reading and writing habits. 137 pupils filled in survey forms and thereafter the MYSTAT statistic program was used to process the information. The results point towards that the pupils read story Books both more often and for a longer time than any other type of literature and that they read them often or very seldom.

E-Books are not yet fully established on the Swedish book market. A frequently discussed theory is that this might be because of a loss in the reading experience. This thesis has the primary purpose to investigate whether the reading experience from E-Books differs from the experience of reading a traditional book in paper. The book used for comparation is a poetry collection named Rakel delat med tio. I have designed the cover and the inlay of this book and as a part of the thesis the working progress is described.

The aim of this masters thesis is to investigate how childrens librarians deal with gender issues in their work when acquiring and mediating Books to children, and how reviews in Bibliotekstjänsts Sambindning can be of help in this aspect. The thesis focuses on children between 6 and 12 years of age and their reading of fiction. Four interviews with childrens librarians and an examination of reviews in Sambindningen have been carried out. The reviews were examined both by finding out with what frequency gender issues are dealt with and by studying 20 childrens Books from a gender perspective, comparing my judgement with the one they got in the reviews. The examination of Sambindningen showed that the reviews therein only sporadically bring up gender issues.

The purpose of this Masters thesis has been to examine the importance of libraries for girls leisure time in secondary school. Focus has been on the use of the library as a leisure activity. Interviews were carried out with six girls of the ages 13 to 16. The conclusion of the study is that the library is of importance for the girls mostly through its Books. Reading turned out to be an important leisure activity for the girls and the Books provided by the library were of significance for their identity development.

The aim of the study is to investigate pupils? attitudes to and experiences of reading aloud by the teacher in grade 1. The study answers questions about how the pupils perceive the reading aloud, what they think they learn from it, and what Books they prefer the teacher to read from. The study was conducted with the aid of semi-structured interviews with eleven pupils, six girls and five boys. The study shows that the pupils have a great deal to say about reading aloud.