The aim of this Master?s thesis is to study various views of sponsorship in relation to public libraries as found within three cultural policy documents. The main objective is to discover which ideas are considered relevant in the partnership between the Swedish retail chain, Åhléns, and the children?s public library, ?Room for Children? (Rum för Barn). In 2005, Åhléns provided SEK3.14 million in sponsorship to ?Room for Children? at Kulturhuset in Stockholm.

The purpose of this study is to the increase knowledge and understanding of the meeting between children with Arabian as native language and a Swedish school library. The study is made as a qualitative investigation built on interviews with eight-year-olds and eleven-year-olds. Only the childrens needs and views are considered. The study is centred on twelve key issues and aims to document the childrens thoughts and views of reading as well as their reading habits and their use of the school library. Through the childrens own words their evaluation of reading and literature, their abilities to assimilate the text and their de facto use of the books can be known.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how children search for and choose picture books while visiting the library together in a preschool group. How do children interact with each other and their teacher while searching for picture books? Which aspects of children's everyday lives are apparent in their choice of picture books? The theoretical frame of reference consists of Brenda Dervin's sense-making approach to information seeking and William Corsaro's sociological approach to studying children's routine activities within a peer culture. To capture children's interaction, we have observed a preschool group consisting of six 3- to 5-year olds and their teacher in a library setting during three visits. Our study shows that children's search for picture books is a social activity that involves various verbal and nonverbal strategies in order to include and exclude each other when they find a picture book that interests them.

The aim of this study is to show how some persons with one of the Swedish national minority languages as mother tongue use a library with regard to their mother tongue and culture. The research questions are: How do Sami-speaking, Finnish-speaking and Meänkieli-speaking (Tornedalen Finnish-speaking) persons use a library with regard to their mother tongue and their culture? What aspects do they find important in this use? As a theoretical frame I have used Marianne Andersson and Dorte Skot-Hansen?s model of the functions of the local library and Will Kymlicka?s theory of the value of maintenance of minority cultures. The study is a qualitative user study. Deep interviews have been conducted with 9 persons with Finnish, Meänkieli or Sami as mother tongue.The results show that the main use of the library is as a cultural centre and the most frequently used service is borrowing of literature.

The purpose of this study is to examine the experiences and perceptions of children`s librarians regarding floating collections in public libraries in Gothenburg. In focus for the study are the experiences and perceptions that exist among children`s librarians when it comes to children as library users, the librarian`s working tasks and the professional role as a librarian. The empirical material has been collected through semistructured interviews with six children`s librarians. The material has been analyzed twice. The first analysis has been conducted through qualitative content analysis.

In an international perspective the Russian children s library is a unique institution, being solely committed to children up to 14 years of age. In Russia of today it is, however, being exposed to hard pressure as the economical and social conditions have changed dramatically since the collapse of the USSR. My interest lies in examining this change of living conditions for the children s libraries and how this in turn affect their work and role in the present state. In order to view this change in a longer perspective, I compare the situation for children s libraries during the time of communist regime with that of today using documents about and from children s libraries. I have studied its legal position and conditions, financial and political state, and how the modern society affects children and youth, especially their daily cultural life.

The purpose of this Bachelor thesis is to gain insight into themeaning of the mobile library for its users by investigatingwho the users are, how they use the mobile library, why theyuse the mobile library and what the users want from the bookbus service. The methods used are observations, surveystudy and qualitative interviews.The theoretical framework of the study is based onAndersson?s and Skot-Hansen?s model of the public librarywith its four different library profiles, together with PierreBourdieu´s lifestyle theory where habitus and the concept ofcultural capital are used to analyze the role of the book busin people?s lives.My conclusion is that the mobile library is very important toits users since reading is an important part of their lives andit gives them easy access to books of several genres. Themobile library also functions as a meeting place in the localcommunity and creates a link between urban and rural areas..

The aim of this two years master thesis is to explore the relationship between public libraries and deaf adults. I want to know if deaf adults are a prioritized group in Swedish public libraries. Deaf adults use Swedish sign language witch is a visual language and differs from Swedish. I discuss the difference in Swedish Sign Language and Swedish and the importance of Sign Language literature. I also explore what methods can be used for mak-ing the library service towards the deaf group more customer centered and service oriented.The lack of sign language knowledge among the library personnel can lead to communication barriers.

The purpose with our study is to increase our knowledge about how personnel in different activities experience the work with childrens who is growing up with addicted parents. What the personal experienced as important facts was structure and flexibility to take care of all children´s special need.Something else they experienced was, during discussions with children it´s important to listen to them and confirm their self-esteem.We have found that there are many well-functioning activities of this kind of children, but there are difficulties to have the parents to take the children to the activities.The personal believe that this is because the parents do not realise their addiction problem enough. The respondents expressed a which to get closer to the school so they can increase cooperation and reach more children in this way, and a lot of these respondents also point out that the community where ever the children are has a obligation to report or notify the social service if there are any children that need care..

The aim of the study has been to find out children?s librarians? views on and management of media that contains topics with a controversial nature and also to find out how this affects the public library as a democratic institution. We have conducted the study by interviewing six children?s librarians. By using Vestheim?s terms value rationality and instrumental rationality, we have been categorizing the answers from our informants and thus identified two different points of view.

The aim of this masters thesis is to examine the supply of magazines and periodicals for young people at the library. We also examine young peoples reading of magazines and periodicals and compare the librarys selection with what young people read. The main questions of this thesis are: What do young people do at the library on their spare time? What weekly magazines and periodicals do young people read? What range of magazines and periodicals do the city- and the school library have? Where is the department located and how is it designed? What kind of relationship is there between young peoples reading and the selection? To answer these questions we have done an interview with a librarian and a questionnaire among 13-16 year old children. We found that it is not often that young people read their magazines and periodicals at the library.

The main purpose of this study was to establish to what extent undergraduate students use reference services, what knowledge they have about those services and what their views of them are.The survey took place at Lund University Library, UB1, the main library responsible for collections in social sciences, humanities, theology and law. A total of 476 undergraduate students were asked to fill in a questionnaire, 273 accepted. The study is quantitative and was carried out during the autumn semester, 1996.The results show that the service used most frequently by undergraduate students is the reference collection. The least used service is the Internet, more than 50 percent of the students never use Internet at the University Library. In general, students are very pleased with the service given by the reference librarians, and with the collection of reference books.

Children's library's primary task is to encourage children to read. Promoted readingleads to increased reading skills. A common method for this purpose is booktalk. This studyaims to examine how children?s librarians work with booktalk aimed towards children andhow it can be developed as a working method to support the library's reading promotionactivities.

This two years master?s thesis is about book circles for children, arranged by the public libraries in Sweden. The purpose is to gain knowledge about how children experience their participation in book circles, and how they experience their own reading. It focuses on children aged 10 to 12 years, and their leisure reading. The research questions are: What are the book circles? function for the participants? How and why do the children read? What kind of literature do they like? Do the children experience that their reading has developed through their participation in the book circles? What parts of the reading process do the book circles influence?The theoretical framework is threefold.

The purpose of this master?s thesis is to examine what needs and expectations the patrons have on the local public library services for adult students. With increased knowledge of these matters the library will be able to support and improve the service for users. The focus is on adult students with immigrant background who study Swedish as second language in a municipal adult education school. The main questions are: How do adult students use the library at present? What do they consider to be most important when using the public library for their studies? How do these expectations correspond to their experience of the library services? Two focusgroups and one in-depth interview were carried out.