The purpose of this study is to explore the concept of the immigrant-writer. By studying the literary criticism on four debutants, all of whom have been categorised as immigrant-writers, I have come to the conclusion that the critics tend to focus on the authors' otherness. By using postcolonial theory I've analysed the role as representatives of a supposed other reality that is imposed on these four authors by the literary critics. The theories of Pierre Bourdieu, especially his concepts of symbolic capital, literary field and position, have been used to contextualise these conclusions. Although the otherness that the critics accentuate seems to work as a negative symbolic capital in a bigger societal perspective, in the author's position within the literary field it grows their positive symbolic capital.

The main purpose of this Masters thesis is to examine gender division in public libraries by reviewing literature and interviewing eight public librarians and two chief librarians. The reason why we decided to investigate this topic is the lack of research concerning sex-segregation in library and information science. By choosing this subject we intend to deepen the understanding of the significance of gender both within the public library and of the occupation in general. Some researchers claim that the low status of librarianship is a result of the large proportion of women in the profession. We want to find out how our informants view the relation between professional status and female domination.

This Masters thesis aims at presenting a picture of, and critically examining, the Swedish debate concerning the public library and the future by way of 21 articles in three library periodicals. The questions examined are: -What are the views concerning the future public library in Swedish library press? -What characterizes the debate and why? Theories on political institutions and information society are used and the method is hermeneutic, a type of idea-analysis. The first step in the analysis consists of a categorized presentation of the material. The themes concern the form and content of the library as well as competence and hopes/fears.

The primary aim of this thesis is to examine female lawyers' relationships to information from different angles. The starting-point is that the legal information, retrieved from through different information sources, is not free from values and subjectivity. The commonly presumed objectivity of legal information is questioned, based on the fact that this kind of information has developed and changed historically in the context of, and in relation to, society. Another aim is to find out how the female lawyers experience their situation in a traditionally masculine working environment. Qualitative interviews have been carried out with seven female lawyers involving questions about their daily work about the sources that they are using.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to investigate and describe the literary life of Madame de Staël, during the period of the French Revolution and the time shortly after. My intention is to do research on her impact and influence. I also want to examine her effect on Swedish literary society, with special references to Swedish authors. The method used is a qualitative one, where I have studied nonfiction and fiction connected with the field, for example Mme de Staëls own writings, which I make use of to illustrate the phenomena. During this period the society was dominated by patriarchical values and patterns of life.

The aim of this masters thesis is to examine the supply of magazines and periodicals for young people at the library. We also examine young peoples reading of magazines and periodicals and compare the librarys selection with what young people read. The main questions of this thesis are: What do young people do at the library on their spare time? What weekly magazines and periodicals do young people read? What range of magazines and periodicals do the city- and the school library have? Where is the department located and how is it designed? What kind of relationship is there between young peoples reading and the selection? To answer these questions we have done an interview with a librarian and a questionnaire among 13-16 year old children. We found that it is not often that young people read their magazines and periodicals at the library.

When producing an interview report the researcher is put to the test of describing the qualitative interview method in terms of assumed orderly steps and procedures taken during the interview process, while at the same time account for a very social dynamic process. In practice, even the most carefully prepared scenario for a qualitative interview study probably does not correspond to the expectations made. What happens between the plans and the actual interview itself? This issue is investigated by contrasting the actual engagement of the participants in an interview project to how these relationships are accounted for in Master thesis from the Swedish School of Library- and Information Science in Borås. Theory and methodology from Actor Network Theory (ANT) have been applied into the area of qualitative interviews.

We have carried out a study of a classification system for the Swedish collection at The Royal Library in Stockholm from 1887. It was printed in 50 copies. The constructor, Bernhard Lundstedt, and his colleagues used it as guidance in lack of a catalogue. We regard it a local classification system. Little research has been done on old classification systems, but Francis Miksa points out the importance of examining them.

This paper is about employees' opinion towards libraries. The target group consists of employees at industrial research institutes in Sweden. Libraries offer several more services today than they have done before. I think many people do not recognise all of them and I also think the knowledge and the opinion about libraries have to do with use of them. Since I am curious about if this is true or not the purpose of this essay is to find out, through an attitude research, the employees', at industrial research institutes, opinion about library service.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to make an outline of different methods and theories within the field of bibliometrics and critically review their strengths and weaknesses. The author studied literature that discussed bibliometric methods and theories. The number of empirical studies that are based on bibliometric methods and theories are numerous and where principally excluded, but some empirical studies were included as part of the argumentation for and against different methods and theories. The author first gives an outline of which methods and theories there are and describes their different strengths and weaknesses. Citation analysis has many different fields of application such as information retrieval, mapping science, evaluative studies and monitoring literature.

The aim of this master thesis is to study electronic publishing, and our main purpose is to examine different strategies of publishing such as: markup languages and page description formats. We examine in what context these strategies are used for publishing, when it comes to scholarly documents produced by Swedish universities and university colleges during the spring of 2002. We apply a sociological perspective as the theoretical framework for to identify the main purposes for scientists to publish their work. We also discuss properties belonging to the different formats: XML, HTML, PDF and PostScript. By doing a content based survey of the websites at Borås University College and at Gothenburg University, we have found that the most common form of electronic publishing, regarding scholarly documents, are lists with bibliographical information on publications and presentations of current research.

The subject of this master thesis is co-operation between archives, libraries and museums. The purpose is twofold: 1 To map out activities within the area to get an overall picture. The mapping is done by studies of documents and consists of international outlooks and an overview of national and regional projects and reports; 2 To investigate how leaders of the respective institutions within the various regions of Sweden apprehend co-operation between the three sectors. The empirical study is accomplished by inquiries and is mainly qualitative. An intermediate purpose of this essay is to try using grounded theory to treat and analyse the gathered material.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine librarians attitudes and values when it comes to the question if a new media, video games, should be introduced at the library or not. Video games are here seen as media primarily for youths. In our study we also wanted to study the discussions of quality and purchase, when computer games were introduced at the library. In order to answer our questions we conducted nine interviews with librarians working with children and youths, in eight libraries. By analysing their statements, using Maj Klassons theory where she defines the librarians role in three different strategies, we could demonstrate how the librarians reason when it comes to video and computer games, youths, quality and purchase.

The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate two pearl growing methods in ISI Web of Science. The methods tested are Find Related Records FRR, an automatic service that uses bibliographic coupling, and Author Keywords AK, where searches are performed using the two first keywords from this field. Both search methods were used on twenty initial documents and the first twenty hits were evaluated for relevance using a binary scale 0,1. The relevance criteria were based on specific information needs connected to every initial document. The measures used to evaluate the effectiveness of the search methods were Precision at DCV=10, P10, and Uninterpolated Average Precision AP.

This is a comparative study of the use of intranet in three organizations. The organizations are one help organization, one hospital and one business company. The intranet is a relatively new medium and it might still not have been accepted by all potential users, which is a waste of resources both for the individual employee and for the overall organization. It is therefore necessary to investigate if there are any differences between organizations concerning the needs of intranets. Our purpose with this study was to deepen the understanding of the use of intranets as a channel of organizational communication and thereby acknowledge the users´ needs and opinions of the intranet.