The purpose of this thesis is to get an improved understanding of what the bases for relevance are, when people in real information need situations make relevance judgements. In order to meet this purpose, an investigation based on research literature is performed. Four types of relevance are investigated: topical or subject relevance, cognitive relevance or pertinence, situational relevance or utility, and socio-cognitive relevance. The investigation also deals with users relevance criteria identified in fourteen empirical studies, in which the users are adults and engaged in oral, textual, and multimedia information retrieval. Finally, the connections between the user criteria found and the types of relevance are discussed.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the information need of the incubators that comes from Chalmers University of Technology and are situated at Chalmers Innovation. It is also of interest to investigate how Chalmers University Library covers this information need. The investigation was carried out using qualitative interviews with representatives of the incubators. They were asked questions about the perceived need of information and which type of contacts they had with the library. The result is that the incubators feel that there is a great need for business information that is hard to find.

The main issue of this master is to investigate what influence the phenomenon of postmodernity has on the Swedish public library. Is it possible to talk about the Swedish public library as postmodern, and if so, is it expressed by a postmodern discourse? The concept of postmodernity is defined as an open and inclusive value system where all kind of opinions and preferences take place. According to a postmodern point of view there is no such thing as an objective or general truth. A postmodern ideology does not talk about reality but about realities.

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 Masters thesis concerns a series of ten police procedural novels, Roman om ett brott, Novel of a crime, by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. These books are among the most translated Swedish novels and have been popular among audiences and critics all over the world. The books were produced 1965 1975, a period during which a left wing movement swept over the Western world. Besides from being detective stories Novel of a crime is an analysis of contemporary society, and this thesis will focus on the social and political ideas and the criticism expressed in the books. Theories used in this study are the Sociology of Literature and the Analysis of Ideas.

User education is an important aspect of university libraries' service to its users. This Masters' Thesis is about online user education. The aim of this study is to analyse five Swedish online user courses in relation to information literacy and learning theory. The web-sites were explored through textual analyses to find how concepts of information literacy and learning theory are expressed. The theoretical framework is based on Carol C Kuhlthau's three levels of user education, Paul Ramsden's three theories of teaching in higher education and Christine Bruce's different aspects of information literacy.

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 main subject with this master thesis is to take a closer look at university libraries specially Gothenburg University Librarys operation of marketing the librarys user contact, how it receives various users demands and carry out the interactive and strategic marketing. Marketing is planning, structuring, implementation, analysis and controls of carefully formulated programs, designed to bring voluntary interactions and relations with the target markets, for the purpose of achieving organisational and user satisfaction objectives. The structure of this thesis covers three main parts. Part I reflects the researchers approach to the subject. Marketing researchers such as Grönroos, Kotler, Bryson, De Sáez and Gummesson among others are presented.

The purpose of this study is to examine the information seeking behaviour among unestablished archaeologists. Special attention has been directed to the areas of informal communication and the development of personal networks. As a former archaeology student I have been able to apply my previously acquired knowledge when writing this thesis. The empirical study is based on nine interviews with archaeologists each with more than one and less than four years of professional experience. They all have various experience of working as a fieldarchaeologist and five have simultaneously worked as university researchers.

The aim of this issue is to study how Swedish public libraries deal with the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of information in connection with public use of the Internet. The authors intention has been to find out whether the public use of the Internet has caused ethical problems for library workers and how the libraries solve situations when they consider their principles violated by library users. The authors study the debate on the issue in a couple of Swedish library magazines published during the late 1990s and they also give a few examples from the USA during the same period. They study the ethical principles and directives for schools published by the Swedish Board of Education as they claim that many of the public library users are students who bring along their ethical conceptions and thereby affect the ethical climate of the libraries. In their study the authors refer to ethical rules given to librarians by their trade union DIK and to the conclusions drawn from the hearing Good Ethics on the Net held by the Swedish IT Commission in 1998.

The aim of this thesis is to examine how different kinds of information seekers are evaluating information quality in the information flow online. To address the problem stated, qualitative interviews were carried out with a librarian as a reference person and a group consisting of journalists and scientists. The result of the study implies that the reference person is well aware of the strategies employed by her in the search process. However, the respondents are not aware of the strategies they are actually using. An explanation is the respondents lack of education in information seeking.

This thesis deals with one of the main questions within information science: The question about controlled and uncontrolled vocabulary and which of the two that are most effective when it comes to retrieve relevant information from electronic databases. The method used here is literature studies. I have described and examined five empirical studies which has been done in purpose to compare the effectiveness in retrieval with controlled and uncontrolled vocabulary, in the way they are used in retrieval of information in databases. The studies I have examined have also used recall and precision as a value to measure the effectiveness of retrieval. The studies which I have chosen is also limited to deal only with studies that have been done in bibliographic databases.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine what part and importance electronic games play in the life of girls, how the girls use electronic games and what the girls think and say about their use of electronic games. We also intend to examine what girls have to say about electronic games at the public library. Our attempt is to illuminate and bring knowledge to those who work within the library with the selection, purchase and conveyance of electronic games. Method used in the survey is focusgroup-interviews with girls in the age between 12-14 years in three different schools. The findings are related to four different perspectives, theory of child development, from a gender perspective, theories of understanding how young people use computer games and theories to understand the purpose of public libraries.

Children of today are surrounded by many different kinds of media. Books have to compete with new media like computers, video games, many TV-channels etc. The aim of this study has been to investigate the reading habits of 9-12-year old boys in their spare time, and their reasons for reading related to their use of other media. Our interest has been to shed light on the boys reading habits, their preferences and motives for reading and their reading functions. Even though our focus has been on their reading, we also have examined their use of other media and the function of this use.

This thesis is structured as a combined empirical and literary study. The aim is to investigate how children at the age of 11-12 years reflect on their readings of fiction and how these reflections relate to the librarians' perspective of a child's reading ability and reading development. Qualitative interviews with children and librarians constitute the empirical part. Research and theories are compared to the empirical part then placed into a more extensive context. How do children at the age of 11-12 years old reflect upon their reading of fiction and how do librarians relate themselves to this age? An analysis using interviews, research and theories is used to answer these questions.