If one looks at physical planning in Sweden today one can see that while talking about densification of existing development, reduced emissions and careful use of important land, urban sprawl is a fact with development of sheer residential districts in the urban edges and shopping malls in each and every municipality. As sustainable development is an essential goal for physical planning to strive towards, it is worth questioning if the direction of today?s planning will lead to the goal. A sustainable development can be seen as an obvious to goal aim at. In reality the aim means a hard and complex work.

In today?s tough business environment the need for good and efficient leaders are becoming more and more important. The businesses are in constant change, the world is more unpredictable and the competences of the employees are much greater today, which also calls for a new type of leader, a leader who not only is authoritarian, but also possesses soft skills. In this environment where there is this greater focus on leaders, leadership developments have emerged and increased in number over the last ten to twenty years. They try to develop leaders in all domains of their life, both professional and personal and the model we work with in this paper is Total Leadership, this model implies that you try to accomplish being a better leader throughout your whole life as a leader, to be whole, genuine and innovative, no matter career or position in life.

This thesis treats a new perspective in the theory of classification, the context-based approach. The aim is to find out what kind of value this new approach can have in the process of creating a classification scheme for a special library collection. The first question to be answered is how the context-based approach works in a real life. The second question investigates which role the research in this particular area might have. Illustrating a real-life situation, the unit of Rättsmedicinalverket in Linköping serves as the object of study.

The background to this thesis is the impact of information technology on libraries and librarywork. If information technology causes changes in the tasks and work of libraries, thenlibrary organisations should also change. It is important to engage and inform the staff if suchchanges are to succeed. This thesis investigates the notions about library tasks and librarywork among eight "middle-managers" at Linkopings universitetsbibliotek.The investigation is based on interviews and then analysed with Soft Systems Methodology(SSM). By identifying the "Weltanschauung" of the staff, the thesis tries to create logicallydesirable and culturally feasible models of systems relevant to the situation at Linkopingsuniversitetsbibliotek.

This master's thesis sets out to explore information literacy in a contextualized learning environment with emphasis on students at a vocationally oriented program in the Swedish upper secondary school. The concept of information literacy is widely discussed and furthermore a common subject for research within the field of Library and Information Science. Information literacy can be described as a set of skills or a range of attributes defining an information literate person. The skills and/or attributes facilitating the development of critical thinking and problem-solving skills are often linked to knowledge about computers and libraries.Another view on the concept of information literacy has been developed by the Australian researcher Annemaree Lloyd. She stresses the importance of social and physical information sources and that these also should be included in the development of information literacy.

The aim of this thesis is to study discursive change in the Swedish environmental political discourse between 1987-2005. The text of three Swedish budget propositions are analysed for this purpose.The results from the analysis are related to a few relevant theoretical perspectives that hold partly different views on what constitutes ?sustainable development? and ?ecological modernization?. Through these theories the thesis continues the discussion around the two central but somewhat blurry terms sustainable development and ecological modernization. The aim of this discussion is to conclude whether the discursive change in Swedish environmental politics can be said to go more in the direction of sustainable development or ecological modernization, or if elements of both perspectives can be found.The analysis shows that the Swedish environmental discourse has come to include more and more political fields such as general welfare politics, during the period.

This thesis is based on a qualitative study on four different preschools in Sweden of which two are monolingual and two are multilingual. The purpose has been to study and compare literacy practices initiated by preschool teachers in mono- and multilingual preschools to examine how the preschool teachers themselves discuss on this topic.The theoretical framework of the study draws upon a socio-cultural theory based on literacy with an emergent literacy perspective in focus. The empirical material has been collected through observations and interviews. We are two authors on this study and the result is distributed in two case studies which are divided on the mono ? and multilingual preschools.

This thesis analyses how friendship between children is described in four Swedish childrens books, published in 1995-2001 and recommended in Barnbokstipset, which is used in libraries for recommending books. Today there are many childrens books that describe various aspects of childrens everyday lives and these books can have an influence on the children who read them. But I found that there has not been much research about how friendship is described in childrens books, although much has been written about the importance of social relationships with peers for childrens lives and development. I analyze the books one by one with the help of a number of questions and categories that I have constructed beforehand. In the analysis I apply Zick Rubins theory of two different stages in childrens understanding of friendship and William Corsaros theory of interactive space which deals with who is allowed to join in games and friendships and who is not allowed to do so and how this is played out.

Library architecture today is a complicated history. Public libraries are no longer merely a place for book storage, but also a virtual library a social meeting place and a place for study. All these diverse tasks and roles emerge in the democratic designing process of a new library and also transform into the architecture. The underlying process is the evaluation and negotiation of the libraries overall tasks and ideas, ideals and values. Multiple ideologies are incorporated in library architecture.

In this essay, we examine the new form of loan which is called ?SMS-loans? which is in understanding terms ? ?text message loans?. This was established in Sweden in 2006. Income-loans are fast loans taken during a short period, usually up to 30 days. Costs which are additional to the loan are interest and fees.

The aim of this two years master thesis in Library and information science is to study the foundation Centrum för lättläst and its work regarding information use with focus on information structures and information needs. The aim is also to examine how Centrum för lättläst cooperate with Swedish libraries to promote the work concerning people with reading disabilities. This master thesis applies a domain analytic theory and method inspired by Birger Hjørland. The domain analysis is confined to examine ontology, epistemology, sociology, empirical user studies, document and genre studies and studies of structures and institutions in scientific communication. The main source material consists of information from the homepage of Centrum för lättläst.

The purpose of this master's thesis is to examine and compare the process of starting a school library at schools which haven't had a school library before, and to examine and compare the experience of this process according to the principals and the persons responsible for the school library.I have examined two Swedish independent primary schools (age 6-15 years). I have made qualitative interviews with the principals and the persons responsible for the new school library. In all, I have made seven interviews. As requested by the new Swedish Educational Act, both schools had recently started creating school libraries. One of the schools had recruited a half-time teacher-librarian and the other had no staffing at all.In the interviews, I have examined the attitudes of the informants towards school libraries, if this attitude has changed during the process of starting the school library, the informants' experiences during this process and the informants' views on the school library as an agent for student achievement.

Public libraries are mainly employing women and have female managers. According to theories based upon so-cial construction we create our roles together in our society. The role of a manager has for a long time been viewed as the role of a man. The objective of my thesis is to gain knowledge on how a few women that work as managers in public libraries perceive and describe their roles. A parallel aim is to let a few future librarians de-scribe their managers and their own views on leadership, with a focus on gender issues.

This thesis is an investigation of Iranian immigrants and their use of libraries in Sweden. It isbased on a combination of a qualitative and a·quantitative method.Using a qualitative method, I give an outline of the history of lran from ancient times up to the present, as well as the different ethnological groups in Iran and their cultures. The main objective of this part is to clarify the contrasts between Iranian and Swedish cultural, social, linguistic and family structures, and also the characteristics of the crisis that most immigrants go through on their arrival in the new country. The qualitative method also involves structured telephone interviews with eight highly educated Iranians.This method was supplemented by a quantitative study through questionnaires of the attitudes· of lranian immigrants to libraries and reading. Iranians in Sweden turned out to be frequent Iibrary users.

This study aim to investigate the conditions framing the professional development situation for physical education teachers (PE) in a small municipality in the south of Sweden. The Swedish National Agency for Education declare that "focus must be directed towards strengthening the teachers' profession", and that "schools need well-trained teachers and good teaching to help students achieve good results". The study focuses both the schools? contribution and the way in which the teachers take own initiative and are motivated to develop their professional skills. The investigation is all based on teachers' perspectives.