The transition from paper to electronic journals in induces a major change in academic Libraries. The library must focus on customising the service to meet user needs in order to compete with other actors on the market. This situation entails the need for a marketing and management approach in library organisations. Linda Ashcroft has in previous research focused on marketing of electronic journals. She has stated the importance of simplifying the user environment of electronic journals and the importance of regaining control over electronic journals from publishers and vendors.

The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to present a survey of how Swedish Libraries provide information services for children. In this thesis ?information? means non-fiction material and ?children? do not include preschool children. The method used is knowledge overview and the material (mostly Master theses in LIS published January 2001-June 2006) is related to user studies of children as information seekers.

The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to investigate the library needs of fourteen-to-fifteen-year-olds. We have limited the investigation to the significance of Libraries for the teenagers in their leisure time. Our focus is the public library with a particular reference to the plans for a new local public library with a youth profile in Malmö. With a departure point in the idea that young people?s use and view of Libraries is to a large extent depending on factors such as social and cultural background and lifestyle, we chose to do a qualitative interview study with eight teenagers.

The purpose of this study is to examine if digital public Libraries are serendipitous environments. Serendipity in this instance is defined as finding something unexpected and valuable, while searching for something else.A survey was conducted at two Swedish digital public Libraries, where the patrons were asked to fill in a questionnaire online. The questions were based on the work on serendipitous digital environments by Lori McCay-Peet, as well as considerations of human factors that could possibly influence serendipity.The result indicate that a majority of patrons experience serendipity at the digital library, although it?s still more common to do so at the physical library or on other web sites. The result also confirms the importance of taking human factors into account when studying serendipity.

Local history collections are fairly common among the Swedish public Libraries and these collections often contain older or rare material. There are no national policies concerning the preservation of rare books at the public Libraries, and the librarians of public Libraries may lack that knowledge. The aim of this study is to examine librarians? attitudes toward their Libraries? local history collections. We interviewed five librarians in the county of Västra Götaland and also made a small observation study of their local history collections.

The purpose of this master thesis is to describe and analyse the development of the library history in the municipality of Karlsborg. This is done with a comparison to the library development in Sweden as a whole and in particular to the cities of Lidköping and Halmstad. I have worked according to the following questions: 1. How did the Libraries develop before the municipality took over? 2.

The aim of this Master's thesis is to study what place public Libraries have in local politics, particularly from the point of view of the politicians. To answer this, I have interviewed politicians, participated as a silent observer of a public debate, and studied articles on library politics in newspapers and other press. The results show that politicians in general have a positive view of Libraries and good co-operation with library professionals, and that they have a fairly up-to-date view of Libraries. They are, however, less interested in library issues in general, and are often complacent with the way things are already running. The newspaper studies show that library issues are usually only discussed when a specific library is somehow in danger.

Little attention has been paid in the literature to libraryassistants in Swedish public Libraries. In this bachelor thesis,the professional role, work duties, career prospects and statusof library assistants are examined at two public Libraries.Because of a scarcity of published information on thedevelopment of this profession in Swedish public Libraries,retired library assistants, as well as currently employedlibrary assistants, librarians and a library head wereinterviewed.Since the ?80s, work duties of library assistants havechanged, with a reduction in some of the more manualaspects of library work, the development of new duties and,overall, an increasing similarity in the duties performed bylibrary assistants and librarians.Additionally, the public perception of library assistants as acategory distinct from librarians was investigated bydistributing questionnaires to library patrons. Contrary toexpectations prompted by statements in the literature, asubstantial portion of visitors was found to be aware of thetwo separate categories.Library assistants at Swedish Libraries have no careerprospects, unless they undertake studies in their own freetime and at their own cost, and obtain a librarian degree. Adifference between the situation of library assistants inSweden and corresponding professional categories in a fewother countries is that, at present and for several years, noformal education for library assistants has been available inSweden.

This master thesis is an attempt to study the joint-use solutions between the public library and the public preschool in the local district Kristineberg in the community of Borås. The two main questions are; what kind of joint-use library is the activity at Kristineberg? What kind of advantages and disadvantages do the actors experience from the joint-use activity at Kristineberg? The analysis is based upon the interviews with eight informants with different connections to the joint-use library and public preschool. I also use documental analysis and literature studies. Relevant theories, such as Andersson´s and Skot-Hansen´s analysis of the role of the public library and Bundys, Imhoff´s and Dornseif´s theories about joint-use Libraries are presented and later used in the analysis.

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 aim of this master thesis is to measure library service quality in two groups of Libraries, newly developed and well established, and to see if there are any differences in the users perception of the dimensions in LibQUAL+. The thesis also examines the different perception of quality for the user groups: undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty. Another approach is to test the Swedish translation of LibQUAL+. Different theories on service quality are presented but the main theories are from the marketing perspective. The grounding and development of LibQUAL+ is described as well as the use of the instrument in different Libraries.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate how Libraries market themselves in social media and why they do it. I have studied a certain public library?s process of introducing social media into its marketing mix, the preparations for this process and the effects of these marketing methods.The theoretical framework for this thesis is based on relationship marketing, a theory which focuses on relationships, networks and interaction. My main method has been semi-structured interviews with a librarian at the relevant library, with the manager of the library and with the head of the municipality?s department of communication.The results of my studies show that marketing on social media is a positive and important thing for Libraries.

The thesis treats how the German public Libraries originated and how they were affected by the Nazi era. It deals with how the library system began to cover the whole nation, and describes the struggle between public Libraries and commercial and religious ditto. It also treats the weedings out and what happened to the staff and the stocks between 1933 and 1945.Furthermore it gives a picture of what books one could find in a German public library,and how these volumes were catalogued and classified. Moreover it describes how theLibraries managed during the Second World War, and ends by giving some topics fordiscussion and asks questions that additional research might be able to answer..

The aim of this thesis is to examine how two young adult departments at two public Libraries work and what profiles the young adult departments have. To examine the work and profiles at the young adult departments I have used the following questions: What are the ideas about working with young adults? How are the two departments in this study working whit young adults? What or which are the profiles of the young adult departments in this study?To answer the questions above I used a qualitative method based on interviews with the librarians responsible for the young adult departments. To complete the interviews I studied the Libraries Internet sites and official documents. The examined departments are located at two city Libraries and were chosen manly for their focused age group, 15-25 years and that the departments are well established.To analyse the results I used the theoretic model of Marianne Andersson and Dorte Skot-Hansen about the role of the public library.

The aim of this master thesis is to study if the websites of the Swedish public Libraries are accessible to all people. According to the library law all people must have access to the public Libraries and their information services. Today, when the Internet is one of the largest sources of information, it is important that all people, including those with different kind of disabilities, children, elderly, immigrants and people with old technical equipment, have access to the public Libraries websites.We have in this study considered the graphic user interface, the language, the structure and the navigation possibilities at ten public library websites. We have from a checklist of our own, based upon the opinion of different experts such as Jacob Nielsen and Tommy Sundström, investigated the websites.The main finding of our study is that the websites are generally accessible even thou we found a lack of accessible for immigrants. Most of the websites had some pages in English, but none hade all pages in this language.