The aim of this two years master thesis is to explore the relationship between public libraries and deaf adults. I want to know if deaf adults are a prioritized group in Swedish public libraries. Deaf adults use Swedish sign language witch is a visual language and differs from Swedish. I discuss the difference in Swedish Sign Language and Swedish and the importance of Sign Language literature. I also explore what methods can be used for mak-ing the library service towards the deaf group more customer centered and service oriented.The lack of sign language knowledge among the library personnel can lead to communication barriers.

In today?s history teaching in Sweden, role-play and historical re-enactment receive littleattention. Even though many students find history as a subject boring and irrelevant, verylittle is done to improve the mode of teaching. My theses is that this could be done bypresenting new ways of teaching and at the same time find a way to make more studentsinterested in history. The main aim is to investigate if there are ways to offer students anexperience of history by carrying out different interactive exercises with a touch of roleplayand historical recreation.

The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to describe the development of the most important libraries in Skövde, starting from 1830. We conclude our examination about 1940, when the municipal library has been active for almost ten years, and the libraries started by the temperance and working-class movements have been deposited at the municipal library. In order to explain this process we describe the development of the Swedish public library and its predecessors, such as reading societies and the popular national movements? libraries, as a background and comparison to the early libraries in Skövde.

This paper presents an analysis of history textbooks used in schools in Sweden and Norway. The intention of the research was to study how the history textbooks describe communism and communistic dictatorship mainly during the cold war. The result of this study is that there were no big differences between Swedish and Norwegian history textbooks, but there are, however, some differences in how communism was described between the authors and also over time. Mostly, the books that were written in the post cold war period were somewhat more critical to communism in the eastern Europe (even thought they mainly handled with Stalin´s communism. And they also set quotationmark between Stalin´s communism and the nazi terror during World War two..

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the transition from SAB to DDC in the public libraries of Sigtuna.More specifically, it aims at investigating why the decision was made to adopt the DDC and how the system has been implemented. Particular attention is drawn to the difficulties and problems that have arisen while organising the libraries open shelves with DDC and to the ways in which the difficulties have been handled. These questions are examined through a pragmatic perspective on Knowledge Organization that focuses on the contexts and domains in which the classification system is used. The empirical material is drawn from qualitative interviews with the former director of Sigtuna public libraries and with the in-charge of the catalogue department.                                                                   .

This bachelor´s thesis analyzes the debate in a number of Swedish media regarding the introduction of video games as a new medium in the public libraries. The theory and method used is discourse analysis. Three questions were asked: how the introduction of video games as a new media in libraries is discussed, how is it motivated and in what way the authors of the articles analyzed are speaking about new media and the mission of the library. The selected articles were divided into four themes and the analysis resulted in the identification of two main discourses, one which is positive to the introduction and integration of new media in the libraries? collections, and one which has a more negative approach and uses quality and culture as an argument. The conclusion is that video games are a medium so widely used that librarians have to decide whether or not they want to include it in the libraries? collections, and by deciding this they reveal their attitude towards the mission and purpose of the public library..

This masters thesis is a study of official political documents in order to discuss privatisation and the Swedish public libraries. In the 1990s public libraries became placed on contractors, and that was said to be one form of privatisation. The main issue for this study concerns driving forces and obstacles for privatisation of public libraries. Another issue concerns advantages and risks. We will also discuss how the future of public libraries will be in this context.

This essay, Pictures from a death-bed, expands on the pictorial genre called post mortem portraits, a field with long history in the western society. A post mortem portrait is an artwork where the artist paint or photograph the model after her or his dead. My survey delineates to treat two specific pictures, one from the seventeenth century and one from the twentieth century. Both of them are portraits of dead boys on their death-beds, but the first one is a painting and the other one is a photo. By this survey I wanted to find both similarities and differentials between the pictures; if they were made by the same reasons, if you could see anything different between the portraits by children and by the portraits of adults, and finally, if there were any cultural or religious connections between the pictures and their existents.

The aim of this essay is to examine how people living in the Swedish countryside looked upon changes in the interiors through modernization in 1850-90. For the first time, there was an abundance of objects available in stores in the countryside that the majority of the population had money buy. Many novelties were introduced in the interior decoration of ordinary peoples´ homes. This study focuses on the introduction and use of wallpaper and is based on a questionnaire about wallpaper sent from the Nordiska museet, National museum of Culture history in Sweden, to people all over Sweden in 1948. 148 people responded to the questions about use and attitudes toward wallpaper during the second half of the 19th century.My theoretical perspective is cultural diffusion, the spread of cultural items, more specific the diffusion of innovations from larger to smaller places, often influenced by social elites, hierarchical diffusion, and between individuals, contagious diffusion.The analytical perspective used for the analysis is based on the concepts of basic and variable modernity, initiated by the historian Sven-Eric Liedman.

The major aim of the thesis is to describe the networks, relations and marketing of some university libraries and their customers in the year 2000. I illustrate how these issues interact and whether they have changed due to the recent development of technology and if so, how. The thesis is based on interviews with two directors of libraries and two librarians at two different libraries. A small survey with 16 questionnaires has also been performed in order to get a more general view on librarians' opinions in these questions. The thesis mainly shows that the networks in which the respondents take part primarily exist in the library sphere and towards the universities.

Library architecture today is a complicated history. Public libraries are no longer merely a place for book storage, but also a virtual library a social meeting place and a place for study. All these diverse tasks and roles emerge in the democratic designing process of a new library and also transform into the architecture. The underlying process is the evaluation and negotiation of the libraries overall tasks and ideas, ideals and values. Multiple ideologies are incorporated in library architecture.

The Swedish government has made the decision to transform the talking book system from an analogue system to a digital system called DAISY by the end of 2004. The purpose of this Masters thesis is to examine how public libraries are affected by this system change. This is carried out by studying the current situation in public libraries concerning the transition to DAISY. This qualitative oriented study is primarily based on interviews with four librarians and three library managers at six public libraries. Management by objectives is here seen as a suitably theoretical framework since public municipal libraries are partly regulated by the governments goals and laws.

This thesis is an investigation of Iranian immigrants and their use of libraries in Sweden. It isbased on a combination of a qualitative and a·quantitative method.Using a qualitative method, I give an outline of the history of lran from ancient times up to the present, as well as the different ethnological groups in Iran and their cultures. The main objective of this part is to clarify the contrasts between Iranian and Swedish cultural, social, linguistic and family structures, and also the characteristics of the crisis that most immigrants go through on their arrival in the new country. The qualitative method also involves structured telephone interviews with eight highly educated Iranians.This method was supplemented by a quantitative study through questionnaires of the attitudes· of lranian immigrants to libraries and reading. Iranians in Sweden turned out to be frequent Iibrary users.

The underlying purpose of this study is to investigate how the libraries in Sweden organize and administrate the service of providing literature in other languages than Swedish. The study focuses on the central guiding principles that regulate the provision of multilingual literature and how these guidelines are implemented in to practice at the libraries. As the guidelines are closely connected to the official discourse in Sweden concerning policies targeted towards immigrants, the guidelines will be examined from a perspective of integration politics. To assemble data a survey has been conducted looking into factors such as how the libraries perceive the guidelines, how the libraries do business intelligence and user inquires to reach out to the users of the multilingual media, forms for statistics and method of working. The results points out that the libraries in their work with multilingual media are confronted with three tensions; the first tension is that between the libraries aim to promote equality and freedom for the individual and at the same time to fulfil certain collective interests and goals.

This paper deals with the development of scientific geography during Antiquity from its mythical background before the seventh century BC to Claudius Ptolemy during the second century AD. The main focus is on questions concerning the shape of the earth, its place in the universe, size and mapping of the earth. Already before 400 BC, the idea of the earth as a globe was firmly estabished. During classical time, Aristotle used empirical and rational arguments to prove that the earth was a sphere and that it was situated motionless in the center of the universe. In the third century BC, the first reasonably correct measurements of the circumference of the earth was carried out by Eratosthenes.