This paper intends to examine how parents think and reflect on gender issues when they borrow books for their children at the library. The theory applied is Yvonne Hirdman?s theory of a gender system. A questionnaire was made available at the Children's department of Uppsala City Library in February, 2010. The material was compiled and analyzed with the intention to try to detect trends, patterns and themes, rather than statistics and hard data.Parents in the study perceive themselves as gender-conscious.

The departure point of this thesis is the context of the institution and the processes surrounding the handling of personal archives at the National Library of Sweden. These processes are examined using Actor Network Theory. Around the personal archive a network is constructed and contained by actors ? the archive itself, the librarian, the conservator, the researcher, organizational structures and others. Within this network choices are made of what is significant.

The purpose of this master's thesis is to examine how a Swedish public library's collection of books on African history looks like, who the writers are and how Africa and its history areportrayed. The focus of the analysis is on the front and back covers and in some cases on theinformation texts inside the books. The chosen library is the city library of Umeå. The 15books examined were found on the shelf classified as Kp ? the classification for African history according to the Swedish SAB-classification system.

The purpose of this thesis is to compare mass digitization and qualitative digitization, to see how the digitization process and the digitalized material differ. The study emanates from the mass digitization as it is performed at the National Library in Norway, and the qualitative digitization at the Royal Library in Sweden. The method used is document studies combined with mail interviews. The focus is upon the practical operation, to which counts: ?purpose & selection?, ?preparation, image capturing and processing?, ?metadata & text encoding?, ?quality assessment?, ?storage of digital originals and copies? and ?display?.

This master´s thesis in Library and Information Science examines the experiences of children who read to a dog. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the interactions between the librarian, the readingdog-handler, the child-ren and the dogs and what the benefits from the interactions might be. The aim is also to examine how the child-ren express their literacy during the readingsessions and how to develop the readingsessions at a specific library. The author follows a reading dog project for seven weeks, in collaboration with a specific school and library. Action research was used as a research strategy, and since action research is done on the basis of practice, a coll-laboration with the participating children, the librarian and the readingdog-handler was significant in this study.The theoretical framework concists of theory and concepts from the sociocultural theory developed by Ro-ger Säljö, and human-animal studies with concepts from Donna Haraway.

The majority of managers of public libraries in Sweden also work as librarians on an operative level within the organisation. This thesis discusses how the manager role is affected by his/her specific assignments and multiple tasks. Seven public library managers, who work in districts with around 10 000 25 000 inhabitants, have been interviewed. They reflect upon their experience of leadership and different assignments. The main focus lies on: - leadership - communication - decision making - organisational development The interviews show some positive effects, the manager is present most of the time, has a great knowledge about everyday work and daily routines, and is also able to represent the library successfully in the local community.

This Masters thesis is concerned with the complex planning process of setting up a citizen bureau in a public library. The aim is to find out how citizen bureaux are designed and to suggest a simplified model of strategic planning. The planning process is studied from a business perspective in the library context, and this perspective is also used to study citizen bureaux and their written plans elsewhere. A combination of qualitative methods are used: observations, focus group discussions and interviews. Observations in the public library showed a great need for an environmental analysis as well as structure to the planning process.

The aim of this two years master's thesis is to examine whether there are any gender based differences in the waymale and female researchers within library and information science publish and reference to other researchers.This within the Swedish context. Further, the aim is to examine the probability of gender playing a part in choiceof subject, which thereby also would effect the act of referencing. This is achieved through an analysis ofreference lists in the journal Svensk Biblioteksforskning between the years 1989 to 2009. The journal containsboth peer reviewed articles, as well as articles of a more popular scientific kind. As guidance during the study, ahandful of questions were used.

The purpose of our research was to examine whether the acceptance and diffusion of RFID technology among the employees at public libraries in Sweden, follow the classic diffusion of innovation model. RFID or Radio Frequency Identification, is a technology that uses radio frequency and microchip technology to track items, in our case, library books and other library materials. Diffusion is the process by which, in our case, the RFID technology is adopted by the library staff. The purpose of this study was to examine what factors influenced the acceptance and adoption of RFID among the library staff. We used Everett Rogers' Diffusion of innovation theory as our framework.

The aim of this master?s thesis is to examine how managers in some public libraries are using performance measurements and to what extent decision making is based on the results. The main questions posed are:??What performance measurements and indicators are used in the libraries examined???What is the attitude towards performance measurements among library managers???How and to what extent are performance measurements and indicators used in the process of decision making???What improvement would library managers wish regarding the development of performance measurements in public libraries?The theory is based on a model of evaluation of the public sector in addition to general steps of evaluation of quality and performance measurement results. The investigation is based on qualitative interviews with seven managers of public libraries in Sweden.

The increased popularity of e-books in the Swedish publiclibraries started a debate in newspapers and library journalsbecause of the increase in costs, which this popularity hadled to. The main subject of the debate was the businessmodel provided by the e-book vendor Elib, which accordingto some ruins the libraries financially. In this thesis, opinionarticles have been analyzed using a theoretical model ofcultural politics by the Danish Library and Informationscience researcher Dorthe Skot-Hansen. The results of thestudy showed that people from the library field, publishersand authors were the ones contributing to the debate. Theanalysis of the articles showed that the model of culturalpolitics which consists of four general motives: socialchange, education, economic growth and entertainment wasvisible in the articles.

Tolfterna was a popular education organization that existed between 1896 and1964 and that arranged social evenings and set up a library for working women. This thesis purpose is to investigate Tolfternas's activities in 1902-1907 and hereby place Tolfterna in the education- and library history. The thesis examines the library catalog and the protocols from the social evenings and analyses them by means of the popular education ideologies of the early 1900's: Patriarchal education, civic education, self-education and the domestic/housewife ideal.The analysis shows that the organizers of Tolfterna as well as the working women who visited the social evenings had political and social interests. This places Tolfterna in a civic education context.The social evenings contained a mix of politically orientated discussions, traditional lectures and entertainment as music and reading. The library had self-education orientation, it contained mostly fiction and was run by the working women.

The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to perform a user oriented evaluation of the International Library?s website. The questions posed in this study are; for what purpose do the users in this study turn to the International Library?s website; what does the users information searching process consist of when visiting the site; how does navigation, layout and content effect the users satisfaction with the website; do the users in this study consider that the International Library?s website can be improved and if so, how? The study was performed with a user oriented approach where six qualitative interviews with librarians who use the website were conducted. These interviews were analysed using Brenda Dervin?s Sense making-theory and Leclercq?s theory about user satisfaction.

The recent decades have been characterised by a trend where the public sector's been inspired by several methods and strategies from the private sector. The public library is in this case no exception. In this context there are different perspectives on whether or not this will lead to a dramatic change of the role and values of the traditional public library. The aim of this master's thesis is to make a contribution to a deeper understanding of the ideological conflicts within the Swedish public library and its relation to the market. In the literature of library and information science I have identified two separate discourses representing two contradictory systems of meaning concerning this relation.

The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to accomplish an understanding for how librarians purchase fiction literature in public libraries. To answer these questions, we have performed four qualitative interviews with librarians in three Swedish municipalities. We have also performed a smaller document study to give us an overview of the used guidelines at the selected libraries. The results of our survey have been analyzed on the basis of our revised version of Sanna Talja?s model The Interpretative Repertoires of the Music Library.