This thesis analyses how friendship between children is described in four Swedish childrens books, published in 1995-2001 and recommended in Barnbokstipset, which is used in libraries for recommending books. Today there are many childrens books that describe various aspects of childrens everyday lives and these books can have an influence on the children who read them. But I found that there has not been much research about how friendship is described in childrens books, although much has been written about the importance of social relationships with peers for childrens lives and development. I analyze the books one by one with the help of a number of questions and categories that I have constructed beforehand. In the analysis I apply Zick Rubins theory of two different stages in childrens understanding of friendship and William Corsaros theory of interactive space which deals with who is allowed to join in games and friendships and who is not allowed to do so and how this is played out.

The aim of this study is to analyse and investigate a rather new field of LIS studies, i.e. link analysis which is a part of webometrics. Webometrics has been described as the quantitative study of web based phenomena drawing on bibliometric or informetric methods. Link analysis has its counterpart in citation analysis within the field of bibliometrics. The questions the study investigates are if webometrics can provide LIS with new knowledge and if there is a place for webometric studies in LIS research.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to understand how librarians develop their reference service. The purpose was to find patterns in how librarians work with reference questions. As a theoretical framework we have used research in the reference field. Where do the skills of the search process come from: education or experience? Answers were sought to the following questions: - How different are the search process in practice compared to theory? - Which similarities and differences are there among the informants? - How important was the education in comparison to the knowledge about the libraries collections? - How did the changes in the school system in 1993 influence reference education and what could the consequences be to the reference knowledge among librarians? We sent out a question form and a search question which was answered by 12 librarians in university and university college libraries.

The aim of this study is to examine how the adult students in the Adult Education Initiative called Kunskapslyftet, experience their use of the Main Public Library in Linköping and how the librarians experience the change in their working situation after Adult Education Initiative has started in July 1997. Methods used in the survey are interviews with librarians and students in the Adult Education Initiative. I have also distributed questionnaires to some of the adult students and studied literature that describe students use of libraries. The result shows that the students generally are satisfied with the service they get from the librarians at the Main Public Library. It also shows that what the students mostly asked for, are help to search information about a subject and to find literature in the library.

The purpose of this masters thesis is to examine the arguments that are being used when closing and establishing peoples libraries. During the 90:ies, in the community of Gothenburg, 4 public libraries were closed and another 3 public libraries were opened. A possible reason for this change lies in the reform from the city Committee that split the community of Gothenburg into 21 pieces; all with one centrally appointed political Committee. The library activity has since the reform was implemented got worse in some areas, foremost in the already neglected city sections, and better in some areas, which where able to establish new libraries. Argumentation analysis indicates that the arguments used at closure where mainly economical and neither the number nor relevance and validity of the arguments where good.

In the digital era, new services have entered the public libraries, like seeking information on the Internet, in databases, newspapers online etc. But many citizens do not know that these services exist. The libraries have a democratic responsibility to inform about them. In the county of Östergötland a project started in 2001 where libraries in five small municipalities built websites in which they present all their electronic services available. One of the aims was with the help of different kinds of marketing to reach special groups of people, like adult students, small companies and politicians.

This master thesis investigates the user education. Christine Bruce has presented a theory of information literacy in her research which has resulted in seven different aspects of information literacy. In this study I wanted to investigate what aspects there were and what they looked like in a practical educational situation. The methods used for this study were observation and a questionnaire. I analysed the observations by using Bruces aspects of information literacy to group the observed activities into the different aspects.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the problems in multilingual thesauri, with a focus on the problem of conceptual equivalence between different languages. This study compares the problems and solutions that have been carried out in the Eurovoc multilingual thesaurus with the ISO 5964 ISO 5964 is a guideline for establishment and development of multilingual thesauri. The Swedish descriptors in the subject area "education and communication", from Eurovoc have been observed and compared with the guidelines recommendations. The results show that, the majority of the investigated Swedish descriptors do not present any problem. Most of the terms that are used as descriptors are found in dictionaries and glossaries or appear with high frequency in Swedish websites.

This essay deals with classification of images using the subject classification system Outline. This classification system is used in regional museums and they do often have large collections of pictures. The regional museums have their main focus of culture history. The purpose is to look at Outline from four different aspects: 1. In what way is the system constructed looking at classification theory, 2.

The aim of this masters thesis is to examine how some childrens librarians in public libraries reason about Wahlströms series books. During the 1970s, there was a discussion about the series books, and the general meaning was, among other things, that the books should not be available at libraries. Therefore, we also want to study if the arguments for and against the series books presented today are any different than those presented in the 1970s. For this examination, two methods have been used. We have done qualitative interviews with nine childrens librarians, and in order to find the arguments presented in the 1970s, we have studied the literature regarding the mentioned discussion.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to investigate how actors involved in a municipal's adult education view students access to information- and library resources. The adult education in the municipal is on contract which means that there are several different actors involved in the realization of the adult education. The raised questions in this study deals with; libraries role within adult education, students needs for becoming information literate and where responsibilities for students access to libraries lies. We used a qualitative method which includes interviews with two principles, a controller, three pedagogues and a librarian. The empirical data is analysed against taxonomies and categories which originates from the theories of David Loertscher and Christine Bruce.

The purpose of this masters thesis is to find out whether the library can be a way to support integration. To fulfil this purpose we have, by qualitative interviews, obtained information about eight immigrant womens views on and experiences of the Swedish public library. Through the literature and earlier research we have presented a background of immigrants and integration in Sweden along with factors that may influence the integration process. We have tried to give an insight into what is said about the immigrant woman in research and media, which we think affects her life and we also have given a short introduction to immigrant womens life in Sweden today. Of great interest for our essay have also been the public librarys objectives and social role in society.

The purpose of this paper is to examine different attitudes regarding freedom of information and how libraries should fulfil their information-task represented by four organisations. The organisations are important in shaping the Swedish public libraries in different ways. The purpose is to examine in what ways their definition of information freedom may differ from one another and what that means in defining the public library. For the survey the qualitative textual analysis has been used for examining the documents and websites that are part of the debate about the public library and information freedom. We chose to interview representatives of four organisations that in different ways influence the shaping of the public library.

The aim of this thesis was twofold, on the one hand to compile a set of usability and accessibility guidelines in order to establish the characteristics of a user friendly website, and on the other to test these guidelines on eight library webcourses with user education to see how well they adhered to the guidelines. The methods used were literature survey and source studies. The guidelines found in the literature survey were divided into four different categories: document properties, structure and navigability, visual characteristics and accessibility. In order to establish the adequacy of the guidelines, I examined reference sources, mostly on the web. To a certain extent this examination has been based on HCI Human-Computer interaction theories.

This thesis presents a comparative study of image registration at two picture collection libraries. The two registration systems are analyzed as to the theoretical principles behind them and their practical application, and related to theoretical tools for subject analysis and bibliographic standards. While a growing number of picture collections now digitize their material, generally accepted standards and methods for the registration of digital images are still lacking. Many different systems coexist, often developed in-house in response to ad hoc needs and based on traditional registration tools created for textual documents, resulting in internationally incompatible mixed-format systems. The two picture collections examined here, however, have opted for similar, standardized tools for registration and subject analysis, and while there are differences in their application and focus, they have both considered issues of cross-system compatibility.