The main objective of this thesis is to examine the situation concerning information technology, computers and information resources for university students at a selection of universities, and their libraries, in Sweden. Another objective is to compare this situation to what is stated in policy documents on the subject, and if the size of the university matters regarding resources. The thesis starts with a discussion of several authors, Frank Webster, Paul F. Burton and Lars Qvortrup among others, and their views on the information society. These range from whether we are living in it, are in a transition period or are still in the Industrial Society.

The purpose of this thesis is to study the usage of and attitudes towards electronic books among graduate and PhD students at Karlstad University. The main questions are: How do graduate and PhD students use electronic books? To what extent are electronic books used compared to printed books? To find the answers, a user study was carried out at Karlstad University library. The results show that a majority of the respondents are aware of the possibility to use electronic books but prefer to use printed ones if they have to choose. Many respondents also complained about difficulties reading a text on the computer screen.

This is a study on the electronic reference work of some Swedish university and university college libraries. The purpose of the study has been to find out how the service works at the different libraries, to study the electronic reference interview and to find what is important when you start a new electronic reference service in the light of Brenda Dervin's sense-making theory study. Furthermore, we examine the aims of the electronic services offered and the differences between electronic and traditional reference interviews. In the background to the study we place electronic reference services in a context by describing the role of information technology and electronic mail in the libraries. The electronic reference interview is studied with the help of literature on the traditional reference interview.

This user study was carried out at the library at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg in the spring of 1999. Chalmers wanted to investigate how much their employees use electronic journals. To facilitate decision-making and be cost effective, the library needed to know about their customers' opinions. The main purpose was to investigate the usage of electronic journals, how the library's choice of these journals affects the frequency of use and what the attitudes towards them are. A questionnaire was sent out to 2 400 employees; 477 replies were received.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine the environmental scanning by the employees and politicians at the central administration at the County Council of Kalmar län. The background of the study is the closing of the administration library in January 2003, which gave more tasks to the hospital libraries of the County Council.The main questions of this study concerns the information needs of the employees and politicians, what electronic sources they prefer to use to satisfy those needs and if they are experiencing a need for more support and help, from a librarian or by the development of a common catalogue of hyperlinks. All 104 persons in the population were asked to answer a questionnaire on the Intranet. The task was performed by 60 persons.

The aim of this thesis is to examine the flow of information in an administration of the municipality Borås Stad. To achieve the aim the following questions were asked: How accessible is information? How is information used in the organisation? How is information communicated? Totally sixteen qualitative interviews was accomplished with employees at the administration. The results of the interviews show that there is a difference in how much and what sort of information the respondents use. They all seem to prefer information to be communicated face to face if possible or over the phone.

The consumer society exploits the earth?s resources more than the earth itself has capability to produce. This over-consumption causes a mass production of products, which mean that more greenhouse gases are being emitted to the atmosphere. This is one of the reasons why the earth?s temperature is rising, where the result of it is worldwide disasters.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine if academic libraries market e-journals, and if so how this work is carried out. The ambition is to study what channels and methods the Libraries use, to inform their users that they have access to e-journals. The aim is also to survey if the libraries evaluate the use of the e-journals, and if so how. The objectives of the work are reached by using two main methods, document analysis and qualitative interviews. The study has been performed on three university libraries.

Cataloguing electronic documents makes new demands on libraries. This thesis discusses the metadata formats Dublin Core and MARC which are, individually or in combination, commonly used for object description in the digital library.The formats are studied with particular emphasis on characteristics such as underlying reasoning (ambitions during the development of the formats), flexibility (possibilities of expansion and adaption to new demands) and interoperability (cooperation between different metadata formats). The formats are dealt with in their context, i.e. we discuss what types of documents the formats are meant to describe, what environment they were originally created for, what functions they are meant to fill (to find, identify, select and acquire/obtain entities), and also how these factors are related. The Swedish projects SAFARI (which uses Dublin Core) and NetSök (which uses MARC) are presented briefly.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to analyse how adult students in Swedish adult education seek information for school tasks. The focus is on how they use the public library and electronic information sources and their reflection on information and sources in this process. Also of interest in the study is the help they receive from staff in the public library and their teacher. Methods used in collecting and analysing data for this study were of qualitative nature.

The aim of this master thesis was to examine the European Commission's information resources from a user perspective in order to clarify the needs and circumstances of the search of EU-information among students at Örebro University. 41 students participated in a survey, and four of them was interviewed. On the basis of Pendelton- and Chatmans theories of information behaviour in small worlds, it were assumed that the students' education and citizenship in the European Union affected their needs and the search of EU information.The study showed that the students needs for EU-related information has increased, with the current education, but also been linked to earlier educations. The students Citizens need were mainly associated with elections such as the EMU-election, but also in some cases to a need of the general knowledge.A review of the European Commission's information resources were made with an emphasis on European Documentation Centre, EDC. The survey showed that most students used the EDC and the EU-databases that was made available by the European Commission through the EDC and the university library but were not aware that they used EDC.The survey also showed that students made use of familiar sources and resources when they searched the EU-information, such as the library's regular database list, the library catalogue and search engine on the internet are not requested of other resources.

The main purpose of this Masters thesis was to examine how the Internet and other electronic sources have affected public librarians use of printed reference sources. During the last couple of years the use of the electronic sources - in particular the Internet has become more established in the Swedish public libraries. Our aim was to examine if and how this has affected the use of the printed reference sources. This has been examined on the basis of the following factors: the gender and age of the librarians and how long they have served in the library. We also examined if the size of the library affects the use of the printed and the electronic reference sources and also which factors that are most important when librarians acquire reference sources.

The purpose of this study is to find out how and to what extent doctors use the hospital library?s collection of print and electronic medical journals. Major changes have the last years occurred in the journal collection. The journals are very costly and little is known about the user satisfaction with them. Therefore it?s important to examine how satisfied the users are with the collection and how they utilize it.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine how the lifestyle of youth between the ages of 15-17 is influenced by electronic media and also what view and opinions youth has regarding electronic media and lifestyle. We intend to examine how and when the youth use electronic media in their everyday lives, what purpose the electronic media has in the life of the youth, and finally what views and opinions regarding electronic media and questions regarding lifestyle the youth express. We as librarians and adults need more knowledge on how youth use electronic media and also what thoughts they have regarding media and lifestyle. We would like to bring some knowledge to the discussion in this area with our study to librarians as well as parents.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how librarians andusers think of electronic books in libraries. My questions are:-What are electronic books, and how do they work?-How has electronic books been implemented by librariansin the libraries and on the libraries? websites?-How do users describe their view of electronic books?-How do the librarians and users think of electronic book inthe future?To be able to answer these questions I have studied relevantliterature, made qualitative interviews with two librarians attwo similar libraries and I had dialogues with several usersElectronic books were introduced 2002 at the two libraries.In the beginning the libraries made different types ofmarketing, but today they only have the website withinformation. Their purpose was to try this out and offer theusers a new media. So far, there are few users who borrowthese books, and maybe it depends on technical conditions.According to the dialogues I had, most of the users have noidea what electronic books are.