The general view of learning has dramatically changed during the last two decades. Today we talk about learning for life and educate to meet the demands of the information society. This new view forces us to constantly relearn and develop new knowledge ? something which has resulted in large restructuring within the upper secondary school. New forms of teaching, where the pupils are given the opportunity to a more active search for knowledge, is developing.

The aim of this master?s study is to examine the function of the public library in the local community at present. I have searched for the answers to the following questions: Which position has the public library in the local cultural policy? What characterizes each library and which are the priorities? What is the local profile of the public library? What cooperation partners does the public library have and what do they mean to the library? Does the public library intensify the local community in any way? To answer this, I have made three qualitative case studies. Interviews and collection of documents were carried out in three different communities.

This study departs from the observation that since the late 1980´s educational programmes for curators have been established and since then expanded greatly. The programmes are part of a process of institutionalization and professionalization of the role of the curator within the international contemporary art field where the role as such has gained much power. Even though many statements have been made about this relatively new phenomenon of curatorial studies, there is a lack of sufficient research. The intention of this study is therefore to examine the educational programmes as such. The selection of 15 programmes has been made with the purpose to include early as well as newly established and to cover a wide geographic area.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine ideas used to legitimate Swedish digital libraries, with a focus on the cultural heritage, their relation to cultural policy and an eventual crisis within the latter. Which ideas are linked to digitalisation? How do the arguments for creating digital libraries differ between central actors? How do the digital libraries relate to cultural policy and an eventual legitimacy crisis? These are the questions this thesis seeks to answer. The theoretical starting-point consists of a legitimacy discussion and its connection to Swedish cultural policy. The method used is idea analysis.

This thesis is an investigation of Bosnian immigrants and their use of libraries in Borås and Anderstorp. The purpose of the thesis is to investigate if people from Bosnia read in their mother tongue Bosnian and if they read in Swedish too. The essay is based on questionnaires concerning both young and older immigrants' reading and library habits. The survey encompasses 30 Bosnians. In the theory I have described relevant literature and confirmed the importance of identity, language and culture for immigrants.

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.

The aim of this master?s thesis is to investigate the value and impact that reading groups organized by Swedish Public Libraries, have on its participants, role of the librarian and the Library as whole, according to librarian?s conceptions. In literature and earlier research reading groups are described to represent an important reader pro-motion tool for Public Libraries. At the same time the typical reading group member is often described as a per-son with a familiarity of reading. Another purpose is therefore to investigate the contribution of reading groups in promoting reading, according to librarian?s conceptions.

The purpose of this essay is to examine how a newly built library and an old library from the sixties work out of an experience and feeling oriented view. Are the fundamental conditions of an old library compatible with the library standards of today? To be able to carry out this examination we have chosen two rather small Swedish libraries. One is the public library of Hässleholm, which opened in the year 2000, and the other is the public library of Kristianstad opened in 1965. The material used to attain the purpose of the study consists of literature studies and qualitative observations and interviews.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to investigate the role of link collections in Swedish public libraries mediation of Internet resources. The study is focusing on the effects on the contents and the structure in the link collections when the target group is immigrant users. This is done through literature studies completed with an examination of two link collections containing multi-cultural and multi-lingual material and qualitative interviews with the two librarians who are in charge of the collections. The major questions raised in this study are: What function do the link collections have for the public libraries? What is the difference in working with traditional, printed material compared to the work with Internet resources? And how are the selection of Internet resources and the structure of the link collections affected when the collection is intended for immigrant users? The main results are that link collections in public libraries can give a concrete form to political guidelines.

Research shows that there is a lack of knowledge of adult students with ADHD. Most of all research focuses on children with ADHD in school. The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of how adult learners with ADHD experience academic studies related to cognitive difficulties, emotion, motivation, and their experience of SOC. The questions tried to determine how any cognitive difficulties and emotions are perceived, how students' motivation to study impacted and their experience of SOC based on studies in higher education. To answer the purpose and questions used qualitative interviews based on three students with ADHD using a hermeneutic method.

In present-day situation many libraries use detectors so that they can be able to prevent attempts too take out books without registering them. The university library in Jonkoping is one of the libraries that have such a detector. But unfortunately it doesn?t always work correct and can also react on other things a part from books. This is a big problem since the library staff don?t have time to check all signals that comes from detector.

This report is the result of an evaluation of a project, conducted by five regional libraries. Through a training course the project should inspire small and medium sized enterprises to use modern information technology and Internet when searching for information. To evaluate the project, qualitative interviews were conducted with five librarians and quantitative questionnaires were distributed to all the course participants. The evaluation shows that the project goals were met, apart from the number of course participants, which was much lower than anticipated. It also shows that the project resulted in an increase in information technology and competence at the libraries, and that the course participants profit from their increased knowledge in their daily work..

The aim of this master?s thesis is to examine how managers in some public libraries are using performance measurements and to what extent decision making is based on the results. The main questions posed are:??What performance measurements and indicators are used in the libraries examined???What is the attitude towards performance measurements among library managers???How and to what extent are performance measurements and indicators used in the process of decision making???What improvement would library managers wish regarding the development of performance measurements in public libraries?The theory is based on a model of evaluation of the public sector in addition to general steps of evaluation of quality and performance measurement results. The investigation is based on qualitative interviews with seven managers of public libraries in Sweden.

The increased popularity of e-books in the Swedish publiclibraries started a debate in newspapers and library journalsbecause of the increase in costs, which this popularity hadled to. The main subject of the debate was the businessmodel provided by the e-book vendor Elib, which accordingto some ruins the libraries financially. In this thesis, opinionarticles have been analyzed using a theoretical model ofcultural politics by the Danish Library and Informationscience researcher Dorthe Skot-Hansen. The results of thestudy showed that people from the library field, publishersand authors were the ones contributing to the debate. Theanalysis of the articles showed that the model of culturalpolitics which consists of four general motives: socialchange, education, economic growth and entertainment wasvisible in the articles.

The purpose of this thesis is to see how the Swedish public libraries present e-books on their website. This study has tried to answer the following questions:1. How do the public libraries construct their definitions of the word e-book, and what patterns are there in the definitions?2. How is the e-book definition presented in the context of the public library websites?This study has formulated its own theoretical framework in regards to how you can categorize definitions in four different categories to help see the way a definition is constructed.