The starting point for this study is the situation for immigrants during the process of integration. This study aims to describe and discuss, with a broad approach, if certain information needs arises when immigrants meet the Swedish labour market and in such a case, do they use the library and how does the public libraries meet those needs. A secondary aim is to help increase the understanding of immigrants and forming a basis for further efforts by the libraries to improve services for immigrants and point at areas where there is a need for further research. - Which expectations and demands meets immigrants on the labour market and which library needs are possibly generated by this? - What services and range of material do the libraries offer immigrants and how are they marketed at the libraries homepages on the Internet? - Do immigrants from outside the western culture use the library and in that case how? Swedish human capital and Swedish social capability are identified as demands that are often held by operators on the labour market.

This master?s degree thesis stems from the new possibilities that digitization offers preserving and increased public accessibility of our cultural heritage, but also how a lack of co-ordination and standardization may result in short-term projects and lack of quality. The purpose of this thesis is to examine a selection of public libraries? digitization projects. The two questions posed are:How does a selection of public libraries conduct their digitization projects concerning a) goals and objectives, b) execution c) what resources they encompass?How well does their work agree with the recommendations that exists for goals, objectives and execution?To answer the questions interviews were conducted with persons in various ways involved with the digitization projects.

The bachelor thesis examines conceptions behind the Swedish public librarian?s opinions of the public library as a meeting place. The study uses the critical discourse analysis, developed by Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, to analyze a focus group interview. The discourse analysis identifies four themes in the empirical material: the imagined arena of the meeting place, the behaviour in the meeting place, the meeting place?s librarian and the polemic against the meeting place.

The subject of this bachelor thesis is the debate regarding privatization of public libraries. The purpose is to investigate howprivatization is portrayed in different articles and by different participants. The articles used are from two of Sweden?s largest national daily papers: Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet and two of Sweden?s largest library magazines: Biblioteksbladet and Tidskriften BiS: Bibliotek i Samhälle. The questions asked are: how is privatization portrayed? Whatdiscourses can be traced in the texts? And: can one foresee a future aiming towards privatization? In order to answer these questions Norman Fairclough?s critical discourse analysis was used as atheoretical and methodological viewpoint.The discourses found were named: The value ground discourse, the market liberal discourse and the pragmatic discourse.

It is said that libraries are the cornerstones of democracy.What is then the democratic mandate, and how is itperceived by the library staff? That's what I examine in thismaster's thesis. I?ve made 14 phone interviews with librarystaff, from assistants to managers, and examined what theirdaily work routine looks like and what they think belongs tothe democratic mandate. I found that all agree that there is ademocratic mandate, but it is not clearly stated in anydocument.I found seven areas that my respondents saw as part of themandate; availability, diversity, children and young people,equality, public education, free of law and cultural history.These are not sharply defined, but can often move into oneanother.

In this master thesis, I investigate four Public Librarys´ program activities. The purpose is to explore what the library program activities contribute to as a part of a well functioning democracy. The theoretical points, I have brought from political science. I assume three different ideals of democracy; electoral democracy, participation democracy and deliberative democracy. All have different views on what can be characterized by a well-functioning democracy.My empirical material consists of library program guides, the libraries´ target documents and interviews with staff at the libraries who work with or have overall responsibility for program activities in their respective libraries.

This thesis addresses the library environment and how it affects the accessibility for the library users. A study is made of the public library in Eslöv. We wanted to find out how the library staff, the senior librarian and the architect discuss the library environment, considering:? The accessibility for the library users.? The possibility for the users to orientate themselves in the library.We also wanted to see how we as users experience the library environment and compare these experiences with the results from the interviews. The material used consists of qualitative interviews, observations of users and our own experience studies.

The public libraries were quick to adapt to the changes that the Internet brought on, and today library websites are an important part of the public library. To meet the needs of teens today, the library website could offer a range of contents to make it an attractive place on many levels; both the academic needs as well as social and recreational needs should be addressed.The aim of this thesis is to evaluate public library websites for teenagers in Sweden, and to examine how well the websites address the developmental tasks and needs that teenagers have. The method used is website evaluation, one quantitative and one qualitative. A total of 60 public library sites for teenagers were evaluated, using 11 criteria based on Havighursts developmental tasks. The quantitative evaluation measured how many functions each website had per criteria, and showed that the majority of the sites had one or two functions for most of the criteria.

This Masters thesis aims to examine how Swedish public libraries deal with the new challenge of evaluating web resources. In order to study this we have asked staff involved in gathering links for the libraries web sites to participate in a survey concerning how they go about choosing links. Apart from trying to capture this procedure it has been our purpose to establish whether the libraries feel they should provide their patrons with evaluated links at all and in what way they are influenced by other libraries or other main figures involved when choosing a link. We were also interested in the differences between libraries with large and small link collections. When defining evaluation, we have only focused on content.

This master's thesis reports on our investigation of how the public librarian's professional identity is formed and what it is formed of. We have considered factors such as: education, competence and daily tasks. In order to fulfil this aim we have used a literature study on concepts such as competence, education, professional identity and profession. We have also carried out an empirical study where we have interviewed nine librarians on public libraries. The method of analysis is qualitative.

This thesis is about the bookmobile service in Sweden of today. The purpose is to examine how the staff motivate the existence of the bookmobile. Other purposes are to study the goals of the service, to describe ?daily life? of the bookmobile, examine the changes of the service during the years and discuss possible changes in the future. The study is based on interviews with thirteen staff members from six Swedish communities, of both rural and urban character.

The aim of this thesis was to investigate the accessibility and activities for dyslectic adults in public libraries in the Swedish county of Södermanland. The questions that were to be answered were four; to what extent do the libraries provide book material and special computer software? To what extent do activities occur? Does the library staff have awareness and knowledge of dyslexia and of activities for dyslectics? What are the obstacles for good service for dyslectic library users? Two methods were used. As a first step, a questionnaire was sent to thirty public libraries. The questionnaire elicited a low level of response, but gave in spite of this an overview of the situation for dyslectics in the libraries of the county.

The aim of this master thesis is to find out if young people and librarians think that reference groups can support public libraries to meet the needs of young people, and if the reference groups, which the librarians describe, differentiates from the young peoples requirements. I have made a qualitative study with a questionnaire to six librarians who have experience from reference groups and ten interviews with teenagers. The result showed that young people have many interests and needs which can be met from the library. The teenagers were positive to the library and many of them showed interest in having more influence on the library. Many would like to join a reference group, but on the condition that they would be offered real influence.

The Internet has played an important role for libraries giving them a means of fulfilling their democratic mission of giving equal access to everyone, including people with disabilities. In order to achieve this it is of the utmost importance that they ensure that their web sites are accessible. In this masters thesis we have examined to what extent the web sites are accessible. The thesis is based on theories of human-computer interaction, information architecture, pedagogy and a checklist. The checklist is derived from established international guidelines from W3C, which has been adapted to, and is used by Swedish public authorities to achieve the mission of a ?24-hour authority?.

The aim of this study is to examine Swedish public libraries preservation of rare book collections. In this study a rare book is rare when it become over a hundred years. I will investigate if libraries have any written policies or plans when it comes to preservation and also what the librarians? opinion about rare book collections are. This is of interest because public libraries have a lack of responsibility when it comes to preservation.