The subject this thesis will investigate concerns the matter of how political ideologies exist within public libraries with a focus on the democratic ideal. Public libraries are part of the political system and we want to show how political ideologies take their shape in public libraries and the possible consequences of this. With the help of three major political ideologies, liberalism, conservatism and socialism we investigate how the democratic ideals of these ideologies are expressed in documents that describes activities the libraries will and have performed. In order to identify these ideologies we use discourses in cultural policy as a bridge between the investigated documents and the political ideologies. As an analytical tool we have developed a model that describes the relation between text, discourse and ideology which we use in our analysis.

AbstractThere is a lot of confusion when it comes to defining Special Education. An example of this appears here by a statement from Assarson (2007) "Special Education initiates a special pedagogy, but contains no innate sense of what is the special component in it" (p. 52, authors? translation). This study is an attempt to clarify the elements of the concept.

The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to describe how Swedish public libraries use Web 2.0-tools and their experiences of using the tools. Focus of the study lies in the contact between public libraries and their patrons on the Web 2.0-tools. For the purposes of the study, the use of weblogs and MySpace were chosen for examination. The methodology used for this study was qualitative interviews.

An increasing number of scholarly publishers are beginning to make their journals available electronically. At the same time there is a growing amount of exclusively electronic journals freely accessible on the Internet. These are facts that librarians have to take into consideration.This master's thesis aims to describe the electronic journal and its role in Swedish academic libraries. In a review of current literature about electronic journals, the authors discuss their strengths and weaknesses, and their impact on scholars, publishers and libraries. To investigate the situation in Sweden, a questionnaire was sent out to 43 academic libraries.Questions were raised about the selection and acquisition of electronic journals, access, technology and economy.The results show that almost half of the 35 responding libraries offer electronic journals to their users.

A qualitative study of high school student teachers' ideas about libraries and school libraries.Interviews have been conducted with future teachers about the library's role in their education,their views on library functions in high school and whether they as teachers will use theschool library. The results show that the students have had some instruction concerninghow to use the library as students, but very little as regards their future teaching. The professorsof teacher education focus on the fact that the library should be used in high schoolteaching, not how to use it. Despite this, the student teachers look very positively upon libraries.Libraries play an important part in their education and they are all sure that they asteachers will use the school library, which includes interacting with the librarian. To them, themost important school library function is to allow pupils to seek information..

The aim of this study is to examine the services offered by the public libraries in the context of distance learning students. I wanted to examine if there has been any discussion among the public libraries on how the new needs and demands affect them. To get a premonition on the development in Sweden I have focused on the public libraries in the province of Blekinge, which in many ways can be looked upon as precursors. Interviews have taken place with the distance learning students contacts at the local public libraries, the responsible librarian and a distance learning organiser at the local university college, the county library consultant and one of the chief librarians. I have reached the conclusion that no thorough discussion on the far-reaching aspects has taken place.

This bachelor?s thesis examines the ideas behind the phenomenon art exhibitions in public libraries. My interest is to see if and how the art exhibitions can support the libraries in being a public sphere in Jürgen Habermas? sense, open for all citizens and their opinions. My study therefore has two purposes.

During the late twentieth century, political and societal changes gave rise to an increased interest in performance evaluation in public organizations. This development also affected libraries in the public sector. The main concern for this master thesis is performance measurement in libraries. In this study two different types of libraries are investigated, one public and the other academic. My aim is to find out if and how performance measurement appears in the libraries annual activity reports.

This thesis is an attempt to study computer games and playful computer programs for childrenand youth at Swedish public libraries. The main method used, is qualitative interviews.The main reason the libraries in the study offer computer games and playful computer programsto their users, is that every member of the society shall have opportunity to use newtechnology such as computers and computer programs. The users of this media are for themost part boys. The librarians in our study wish to have pedagogical games and programswithout violent themes at their libraries. Lending computer games and computer programs isnot of any priority for the libraries..

rary of Sweden Statens musikbibliotek [51][pdf.gif] The aim of this study is to investigate how bibliographic description of music materials has improved through history. The historical aspect is given by a study of bibliographic data in different catalogues of a specific collection. The aim is also to understand what specific problems will arise in the work of cataloguing music materials and how the problems are discussed in the literature. The study is focusing of church music material and the history of churchmusic is therefore given an exposition. The origin of musical notation, which took place within the church, is also discussed.

The purpose of this study is to examine the physical space of children?s libraries in Sweden, and also to see which influences there are in the literature about the same subject. What ideas exist in the literature about the physical room of children?s libraries? We have studied how and if these influences can be seen in a selected number of children?s libraries. Our theoretical perspective is based on Anthony Gidden?s theory of construction.

The purpose of this masters´ thesis is to examine the attitudes of public librarians towards easy-to-read literature and see whether a connection between these attitudes and accessibility can be made. The study has been performed with a qualitative approach and consists of four depth interviews with emphasis on how librarians relate to and experience easy-to-read literature and its´ users. As complement to the depth interviews, two micro interviews were made. The study can be seen as a follow up to a survey I made 2005, commissioned by The centre for Easy- to-Read. As analytical tools the cultural sociological theories of Pierre Bourdieu, with his concepts field, cultural capital and habitus, have been used.

In 2005 we made a research in a Swedish community board about their view on the political and ideological intentions of ?a school for all?. The results from that study were the background to this research.The aim with this research was to find out how principles in the same community were thinking about ? a school for all? and if they were leading a development towards ?a school for all?. In that context they were given the opportunity to explain their definition and reasoning about ?inclusion? and ?integration?.

The aim of this master thesis has been to investigate discussions about public access to Internet in public libraries. Areas of interest were the debate in Sweden as well as in the United States. The approach was qualitative and questionnaires were distributed by e-mail to a number of Swedish public libraries. The results from the survey were then supplemented with a theoretical background and a literature study. The usable questionnaires obtained from 20 libraries showed a rather uniform approach among the Swedish librarians of how the Internet is best provided by public libraries.

Today, "the digital library" is the common way of describing a managed collection of information, with associated services, stored in digital formats and accessible over a network. Digital libraries have mainly been developed at research libraries, but during the last few years public libraries have started to offer similar services.The aim of this Master's thesis is to study how the Swedish public libraries plan to develop their digital libraries according to their mission statements, and in what way they have implemented them at their web sites. 21 public libraries, the largest in each Swedish county, were investigated.The library mission statements are investigated to find out in what terms the digital libraries are described and to what extent. The library websites are examined with respect to what kind of digital services are offered, to what extent they supplement or replace the physical library, and if there are new digital services not found in the physical library.In most mission statements the digital library is referred to in sweeping terms like "IT activities" and "new media". However, a few of the libraries clearly regard the digital library as an important part of the future operations, speaking of it in well defined and extensive terms.The public library websites are relatively homogeneous when it comes to services supplementing physical library activities, like web access to the library catalogue and links to other library catalogues.