Our aim with this study has been to show the central factors that we consider have had animpact on public libraries in the "information society". We have studied two communities in the south of Sweden, Ronneby and Sölvesborg. These two communities have both started a development to the IT society, a society where information plays a great role, where the technique is the tool that supplies information.Ronneby community had early the aim to be the chief Swedish information center. A priority on information technology has therefore been obvious for them. Sölvesborg community has had another method and time schedule towards the IT society.We have been studying the documentation of aim and the strategy for IT development in different levels.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine how librarians in two Swedish public libraries view the subject of face-front marketing and literary hierarchy. The questions posed in this thesis are: How do two public libraries in Sweden market fictional literature? Which literature does get marketed? How do the librarians view fictional literature? How do the librarians view marketing? and Does Herbert Gans? literary scale work to examine the marketing of fictional literature in two Swedish public libraries? The theoretical starting-points are Niels Ole Pors? thoughts on stock development, Philip Kotler?s thoughts on the responsible non-profit organisation and Herbert Gans? thoughts on taste-publics and taste-cultures. The empirical material was gathered through qualitative interviews with library staff in two public libraries in the south of Sweden, and by reading a sample of the fictional literature exposed in these libraries.

The National Libraries task to save and preserve the national cultural heritage has turned to a new challenge in a digital world. The preservation of born-digital material for future use requires not only saving the digital object itself but also information about the object, preservation metadata. This is a relatively new issue and the library community has very little experience in this area. It has become evident that international cooperation is necessary to solve the task and that the development of international standards is of fundamental significance. This thesis investigates what has been done to meet the problems with the fast obsolescence of digital material with the focus on metadata.

The main object of this paper is an attempt to illustrate the present situation of TeheranUniversity Central Library and its 17 faculty libraries. The main aspects of these librarieswhich will be discussed are collections, staffing, management, shelving, cataloguing and thelibrary users. The findings of a survey which was conducted by the author in Iran in thesummer 1995 form the main basis of the discussions.Some of the problems in these libraries are mentioned and the possible solutions arerecommended.The study also examines the role and effect of the Islamic Revolution and de-westernizationpolicy of the present regime on these libraries.A historical background of higher education, foundation of the University of Teheran,librarianship and the whole range of libraries in Iran are discussed briefly..

The aim of this master thesis is to measure library service quality in two groups of libraries, newly developed and well established, and to see if there are any differences in the users perception of the dimensions in LibQUAL+. The thesis also examines the different perception of quality for the user groups: undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty. Another approach is to test the Swedish translation of LibQUAL+. Different theories on service quality are presented but the main theories are from the marketing perspective. The grounding and development of LibQUAL+ is described as well as the use of the instrument in different libraries.

The aim of this bachelor thesis is to study how libraries handle metadata in institutional repositories. The methodology of the study is semi-structured interviews with librarians from all Swedish libraries that currently use the institutional repository system DSpace. Metadata schemes from the different libraries have also been studied. As analytical tools the study uses the user tasks presented in Functional Requirement for Bibliographic Records, as well as a study of metadata quality made by Jung-Ran Park. The study shows a rather big difference between the ways the libraries use institutional repositories.

I?ve previously been working with patterns for wallpaper and wanted to try anotherapproach.I wanted to use a strange story as a base to develop a wallpaper collection from. Theaim was to make a collection that is more than wallpapers. The seed to this idea Igot from an article about mysterious deaths among birds in Chicago published inmetro. They had flown into a large building.

This master thesis focuses mainly on the concept of quality and how the librarians responsible for phonogram purchase use it. The main object is to investigate how the librarians responsible for the purchasing of phonogram works when in the process of selecting the phonograms and how they speak about the concept of quality. Based on this main object four problems has been addressed. The empirical material is interviews made with the seven librarians responsible for phonogram purchase at seven Swedish libraries. The result of this investigation is analyzed based on a theoretical framework created by Sanna Talja, which focuses on what a phonogram collection should contain.

In 2003 the libraries of ten municipalities in the northern part of Sweden were each given 10 000 (SEK) by the BIN-project to purchase books on demand instead of making inter-library loans. This attempt was called Köpa på efterfrågan (Purchasing on demand). The purpose of this master thesis is to evalutate Köpa på efterfrågan. The results of the evaluation show that the books purchased on demand were quite popular. Almost all the purchased books were non-fictional with most books being bought within the field of medicin.

This paper deals with the use of Internet at Swedish public libraries. The author asks whether public libraries should or should not limit access to information available on the Internet. Starting from the American discussion, concerning Internet at public libraries, the author shows the Swedish attitudes. The paper demonstrates that many Swedish public libraries have adopted rules forbidding retrieval of certain kinds of information, such as hard-core pornography and racist propaganda. The persons in charge of such actions claim that public libraries should provide high-quality educational literature and should not spread mass-produced, provocative information.

This thesis deals with classification of the subject field history of medicine. The two classification systems SAB and NLM are compared in order to find out which one is the most adequate to organize a small collection of history of medicine. SAB and NLM are the two most commonly used classification systems in medical libraries in Sweden today. NLM classification system specializes in medicine and SAB is a universal classification system. Our purpose with this study is to find out the pros and cons of each system, whether the systems treat the subject history of medicine in a satisfactory way and what kind of classification system that is better for this assignment, a specific one or a general one.

The aim of our Master´s thesis is to investigate the development of the different libraries in the former communities of Flisby and Lofta during the former part of the twentieth century. We ask the following questions:How did the libraries in Flisby and Lofta develop between the years of 1905 and 1952?How can we understand the libraries? dependency of funding of different kinds? We have used case study as a method, and we have adopted a source criticism approach. We have mainly used our local archives and among other things we have investigated various sorts of protocols, annual reports, auditor?s reports and the accounts that were sent to the Board of Education.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the benefit of information literacy instruction in two student groups at Kristianstad University, in relation to development of critical information literacy and within the boundaries of the educational goals. This study takes on a critical information literacy perspective that combines critical pedagogy and standards for information literacy in higher education. Two methods have been used for data collection: interviews and questionnaires. According to the results of the study the information literacy instruction provided by the Kristianstad University Library is important and useful for the students in their academic studies. It also becomes clear that the information literacy differs between the two groups as a consequence of the varying information literacy instruction received by the two groups.

The purpose of this Master thesis is to compare the perception and significance of reference work in two countries, Sweden and Germany. This will be achieved by means of a literature review of previous research literature and public documents and a content analysis of articles from two library journals.A first step was to examine the historical development of reference work in the selected countries. In connection with this there proved to be distinct phases in the discussion regarding reference work. These phases with their specific discourses, themes and emphases reflected and thus later were confirmed in the second part of the study.The results show that despite some similarities there are also quite a few differences in how reference work is perceived in both countries. For Sweden, the idea of reference work was introduced relatively early.

A trend since the early 90?s has been that some public libraries offer a special shelf containing environmental information to the community, but it seems as though the subject has been overlooked by the literature and the science community. The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to study how three independent public libraries work with environmental information that is made available to the community. The following questions were addressed: 1) Which arguments can be found as to why the libraries offer this activity? 2) How does the environmental work at the public libraries look and what does it contain of? 3) Are there any similarities or differences in this work between the three libraries?To answer these questions interviews with librarians were carried out; observations were made to complement the interviews.