The living library started in Denmark at the festival of Roskilde in 2000. It was initiated by the youth organisation ?Stop volden? (?Stop the violence?). Since 2005 the idea of lending a human being who represents a prejudice has also become a practice in a few public libraries in Sweden. I found it interesting to analyse the living library in relation to the mission of diversity in the public library.

The focus of this master thesis is the library politics of the French Right wing party the National Front and the debate that followed the application of this politics. This qualitative study is divided into two parts where the critics to this politics represents one side and the adherents the other. The critics are composed by representatives from the French, Swedish and ? to some extent ? international library sector, while the adherent side is made up of politicians from the National Front and their adherents. The empiric material mostly consists of articles published in library, Right wing and daily press.

Street art can be defined as an artistic expression, often anonymous and illegal, which is constructed in the public environment. The purpose of this essay is to provide a broad and balanced picture of what street art can mean. The aim is to examine street art as a phenomenon. What features has the phenomenon and in what ways is it important for the creators, spectators and place? This paper focuses on graffiti.

Nedsättningar i luktsinnet är vanligt förekommande i befolkningen, och kan få negativa konsekvenser för en individs livskvalitet. Försämringar i luktsinnet kan dessutom förebåda kognitiva försämringar hos äldre. Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka om daglig luktminnesträning gynnar luktsinnet hos vuxna, och om träningen även leder till en förbättring av förmågor som inte direkt tränas. Under 40 dagar fick deltagarna (n=18) spela en specialutformad version av spelet memory, innehållande lukter. Luktspelets effekter på deltagarna jämfördes med en kontrollgrupp som spelade ett visuellt minnesspel.

The purpose of this study was to examine the narrative skill of sixyear-olds in terms of macrostructure and cohesion, and its relation tonarrative content, auditory attention, auditory short-term memory and threemeasures of word retrieval. A group comparison of macrostructure andcohesion was also performed between children with and without epilepsy.The material consisted of audio recordings of 44 children (18 with epilepsyand 26 from a reference group) retelling the story Nelli-sagan (Holmberg &Sahlén, 2000). No correlation was found between content and macrostructureor cohesion, but several between the latter two. Auditory short-termmemory and word retrieval without pictures showed several correlationswith macrostructure as well as cohesion. No differences in macrostructure orcohesion were found between the children with epilepsy and the referencegroup.

I approach the subject of adult readers of young adult fiction through an analytical framework influenced by Cultural Studies, implicating that young adult fiction is caught up in a system of distinction between popular literature and high literature. I contrast this with theories that suggest that there has been a loosening of this hierarchy and that they now coexist, even borrowing features from one another. I also examine questions of ideology, namely the ideology of mass culture, the ironical attitude and the ideology of populism. I also use Andreas Huyssen?s theory of mass culture as a woman, seeing as popular literature often tends to be categorized with feminine traits.

The making of a cultural historical exhibition usually involves the collaboration of two categories of professionals: the curator, in charge of the exhibition content, and the designer. From these positions, representing content and form, the team is in charge of cooperating towards a shared goal ? the exhibition ? which is the spatial expression of ideas.This MA thesis is based on my work experience as a designer of cultural historical exhibitions. By means of situations where my perspective collided with that of the museum curators?, I examine our different concepts on a number of issues: the meaning of an exhibition; the process; and the perception of what our respective roles are.

This assignment focuses on the concept of ?school trips? and Gotland. Pedagogically, the school trip was initially focussed on practical and national aspects, the education to be made visible and the idea was to present Sweden, its nature and its industries. The Gotland administration chose to focus on the unique and cultural history, and it was unusual that visits were undertaken to factories and workshops. This was also the start of the current tourism trend where knowledge of the value of the countryside and the opportunities for tourism is a successful combination, which can be seen today even if the school trips now have different areas to visit.

This thesis takes its starting point in the humanistic cultural-geographical concept of place, with the aim of achieving a greater understanding of what constitutes the place Mon today. Mon is located in the northwestern part of Dalsland. Until 1879, the area was described as outlying land, but with the extension of the railway between V?nern and the Norwegian border, Mon's station community emerged. In the mid-20th century, all activities in Mon were phased out, and since then, the place has been inhabited by only about 10 year-round residents.

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.

The main purpose of this master thesis is to give the reader a picture of the experience of art and of its room in the public libraries, but above all to examine the phenomenon temporary art exhibitions in public libraries in the county of Östergötland. The study is limited to a specific activity of art, namely temporary exhibitions in libraries. Geographically, the investigation is limited to the public libraries and their branch libraries in Östergötland. Time concentrates on the present situation in 2000 and 2001. Methodologies are partly observations in some libraries, partly qualitative questionnaires to all primary libraries and their affiliates in Östergötland.

Storytelling is a complex action that requires many linguistic and other cognitive abilities, like memory and attention. Resent research has shown a correlation between oral story retelling and picture arrangement among children with neurodevelopmental disorders. The present study analyzes if this correlation exists among a convenience sample of children from the general population. 77 children between 3:11 and 9:0 years old accomplished Bus Story Test and a picture arrangement task from WISC III. Significant correlations was found between picture arrangement and Bus Story Test?s subscores sentence length, subordinate clauses and information.

Literary debates about canon occur regularly. In the summer of 2006 such a debate took place in Sweden. The aim of this Master thesis is to examine the debate to identify the different discourses and what they reveal about ideas concerning the role of literature in society. The empirical material used for the analysis consists of 46 debate articles from three important newspapers. The combined theory and method applied is the discourse analysis described in Ernesto Laclau?s & Chantal Mouffe?s discourse theory.

In 2006 the government assigned the Council of Cultural Affairs the task of making an update, consisting of 50 literary titles, to be added to the existing list called Alla tiders klassiker ? en klassikerserie för skolan (All-time classics suited for school).      The idea of ??a literary canon can be considered to be a tool for transferring socially, historically and culturally constructed norms and values ??from one generation to the next in order to create and maintain a common frame of reference. The common frame of reference affect the individual's thoughts and actions as well as their sexual desires and their own perception of self as a sexual being.

Children are said to be the future of our society. Hence, how we take care of our children is a cause of concern. This is evident in much of the social work that is carried out in Sweden. One of the times when we find children to be the most vulnerable is when they, for different reasons, are separated from their biological families and placed in foster care. Based on the fact that Sweden over the last century has experienced an increased immigration intake we wanted to take a closer look on how this change of the population dynamics has influenced foster care in the country.