The purpose of this study is to examine teachers and school-leaders attitude to the school library. Both the cause of and the consequences of these attitudes are examined. In order to fulfil my purpose I have examined this through both literature and empirical studies. I have interviewed the headmaster, the school librarian and two teachers at two comprehensive schools. As theoretical framework I have used David Loertschers taxonomy containing theories about the levels in an ideal school library and Miles model of school development.

This Master?s thesis aims to study how the concept ?youth? is understood and used in papers and publications about public libraries, written at The Swedish School of Library and Information Science from 1972 to 2002. It does this by answering three questions: Firstly, how is the concept ?youth? formulated in papers and publications at SSLIS from 1972 - 2002? Secondly, has the concept ?youth? changed in the analysed texts during the chosen time and, if that is the case, what constitutes this change? And, finally, what types of consequences for the understanding of the users can this have for the writers and readers of these texts? Discourse analysis is used to analyze how this concept is constituted, transformed and understood. Among the things studied in the discourse analysis is the interdiscursivity and intertextuality of the texts, as well as the meaning of the word, the wordings and modality of the analysed texts.

The aim of this thesis is to examine how librarians and family historians experience their interaction at the reference encounter, what influences these views and how they affect the service; whether the family historians are aware of these views; which subject knowledge is needed and how this knowledge affects work performance; if there is a need for continuing education, and finally, if the family historians themselves can work as a resource for the library or the librarians? The thesis consists of three parts; in the first a theoretical frame was constructed around the concepts service, continuing education, subject knowledge and attitudes. Role theory was used as a theoretical background to show how expectations influence professional roles. The second part consists of the results given from the qualitative interviews with librarians and surveys with family historians that were performed. In the last part a discussion from the theoretical and empirical information earlier received was made.

The aim of this thesis is to discuss selected parts of cataloguing both from a practical and a theoretical viewpoint. It presents the basic grounds for cataloguing of printed as well as non-printed materials. The focus lies on the main entry heading and its author/title problem concerning film. The thesis theoretical part consists of an analysis of central documents dealing with the author concept from both a library- and information science perspective and a film science perspective. The practical part consists of interviews from two Swedish public libraries, which have different approaches on presenting films.

The aim of this thesis is to describe and critically investigate eight different evaluations of the retrieval effectiveness of webbased search engines. The questions to be answered in this investigation are: - What kind of relevance judgements have been used? - Which criteria have been used when judging the relevance of a document? - Which measures have been used? - How many queries have been used? - How were the queries constructed? - What document cut-off value has been used? - Has hypothes testing been applied? - What kind of webbased search engines have been included in the evaluations? The study showed that although the evaluations investigate the same phenomena, they are very different from each other in certain aspects. Generally the study showed that precision is the preferred measure in comparison to recall in the chosen evaluation even though all the included evaluations have constructed unique formulas for calculating precision. Some attempts to measure relative recall have been performed but they all suffer from different defects.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ancient library organisation in the Mediterranean area. The focus of the study is if they used catalogues, marked their material and their methods for shelving. During the ancient period the people used to write on clay tablets, parchment- or papyrusrolls and codex, which was significant for the organisation. The method, which I use, for the examination is based on criticism of the sources, how the modern scholars has interpreted ancient remains and texts. The study shows that the first evidence for library organisation is from Mesopotamia 2350 BC.

The purpose of this Masters Thesis is to explore the process of selection that librarians face when selecting and acquiring cultural magazines to public libraries. The methods used are qualitative interviews and literary studies. A brief review is given of acquisition policies at public libraries and of cultural magazines and the important role they play in public libraries. Five interviews have been made at five public libraries to find out what factors affect the process of selection when it comes to cultural magazines. Two theories are used as a basis for the analysis of the result of the interviews and literary studies.

This thesis examines the effects of proximity operators and query expansion with synonyms on retrieval performance. The queries were expanded with synonyms and structured with proximity operators where the permitted distance between terms varied from 1 to 3. The expansion terms were selected from the online lexical reference system WordNet. Initial query terms were selected from 28 topics that contained compound words and were chosen on the basis of their expandibility. The English morphological analyser ENGTWOL was used for normalization of query terms.

This thesis takes on a broader perspective of the modern age phenomenon we call spam. One of the aims of this thesis is to present and to compare the variety of methods used in the day-to-day fight against spam, as far they have evolved today, but also to present and discuss some alternative methods for suggested future use. The properties of a common e-mail spam are analyzed to show how the components that make up the structure in an e-mail can be used to classify spam. Furthermore I explain the naïve Bayesian classification methods, the signature-based method, the commonly used rule-based method and the challenge and response method and discuss these. The widespread use of blacklists is also explained and a close new variant to blacklisting, Turntide is presented and discussed.

The purpose of this Master Thesis was to study the reader in the informal reading group. To fulfil our purpose we have used the following questions: how did the reader become a reader and what does her reading look like, why do people choose to participate in a reading group, how may the group influence the individual member in her reading and interpretation of a book, does the reading group have a therapeutic function, how does the informant find the group dynamics and different roles in the reading group, and finally how does the informant experience the discussion in the reading group. We have used two studies about reading groups, one by Elizabeth Long and one by Jenny Hartley. Our theory is divided into reading and group psychology. We have interviewed seven women belonging to different reading groups.

The purpose of this masters thesis is to examine how managers in public libraries are managing financial cuts. Questions posed are: What strategies are used by the library manager to handle the cuts and how are the strategies being worked out? What are the consequences of the cuts? How do the managers use their library plans in the work with the cuts and how do the plans change as a consequence of the cuts? Library managers in eleven communities are interviewed about their financial cuts in 2003 and/or 2004. The result shows that cuts are made in different ways. The study analysed the managers statements with a model about strategies created by Oulton.

In this thesis, we are concerned with the many different professional roles that a public librarian, working at a small library, has. More specifically, the purpose is to find out which different roles that librarians believe they have, and which view they have upon those. Furthermore, we are exploring the tendencies that librarians discuss in relation to these professional roles. To pursue this goal, we have used the methodology of focus group interviews, with the unconventional twist that our interviews were done using web chats. This may have the advantage that the informants may present more honest views than when using ordinary interviews due to the anonymous character of chatting.

The purpose of this Masters Thesis is to explore the impact of spare time reading fiction on the identity of teenage boys, and what it really means to them. To investigate this, we have focused our investigation on how teenage boys relate to and what they search for in their reading. The data collection is based on 8 interviews with boys in the age between 14 and 15 and on literature on the subject. The theoretical framework focuses on the reading theories of Joseph A. Appleyard, the transactional theory of Louise M.

The aim of this study is to examine a number of Swedish working public librarians and compare them with some popular standard images of librarians. In this project we have been working in line with these three questions: How do the librarians describe themselves and how can the descriptions be interpreted? What images are the most common and repetitive, according to earlier research? What differences and similarities are there between the images of the librarians and the working librarians? To answer the questions we have performed seven qualitative interviews with working librarians and collected relevant literature that presents various portrayals of librarians. To interpret the interviews we have used Pierre Bourdieus theories of social space, social fields, habitus and the cultural, academic, social and the economic capitals, as well as the connection between individual taste, class and social power. The conclusions of the collected material of earlier research and the interpreted material from the interviews have been compared and discussed.

This master thesis deals with the looting and destruction of the Iraqi cultural heritage in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in April 2003. My ambition is to analyse the narratives conveyed by journalists and intellectuals to see which truths that were established. Using discourse analysis methods, my aim is not to find an objective truth in the matter at hand, but rather to se which truths the writers put into view regarding the question of liability and the seriousness of the looting and destruction. This paper further discusses these truths from the perspectives of imperialism and of Edward Saids thoughts about Orientalism.