The main purpose of this Master thesis is to illuminate the understanding of local politicians regarding the public libraries and the librarians. We argue that the local politicians´ opinions regarding public libraries and librarians influence the way they act and react in their roles as politicians.In order to achieve the aim of this thesis we focused on following questions:What are the opinions of the politicians:- regarding themselves in relation to the public library?- concerning public libraries in general and its functions especially in the municipalities of their own?- concerning the librarians and their work in a public function?What are the conclusions to be drawn regarding the politicians´ interest and commitment to public libraries in the politic daily-life of the municipalities? Our empiric material consists of qualitative interviews with six politicians elected in two municipalities in the interior of Västerbotten, a northern sparsely populated district. In order to distinguish the various opinions that emerge from the material, we apply a phenomenographic approach. The analysis result we present in three conceivable categories in order to express the different opinions.In general our study points at a positive and favourable attitude to the public library, and all the respondents assume that the municipality ought to offer this service.

Traditionally, the majority of Swedish public libraries have carried out most of their acquisitions through Bibliotekstjänst's binding booklets. In recent years, however, many libraries have complemented the binding booklets and other services from Bibliotekstjänst by other ways of acquiring books, such as Internet bookshops, while other libraries have stopped using the binding booklets altogether. There are various reasons for this development, such as Information Technology making it possible for librarians to compare prizes and services from different retailers. Another important reason is the need for public libraries to meet new needs from their patrons, while remaining on a restrained budget, which often causes a need for reorganization of staff and resources.As a way of meeting the new needs for libraries, Bibliotekstjänst has created Profile Services (profiltjänster), a service in which a library outsources its acquisitions to Bibliotekstjänst. The staff of the library, in dialogue with Bibliotekstjänst, design a profile for the acquisitions for the library in question, in order to determinate which types and genres of literature the library and its patrons are requesting.

In a web environment the library and the librarian continue to function in their role as information provider even when the physical library is closed. Research question is to describe how and in what extent the public libraries websites are integrated in their daily activity and what the causes are for that. The empirical material consists of a survey of number of public libraries websites and qualitative interviews with responsible librarians. I have delimited the study by only investigating the websites of Gothenburg public libraries. In my survey of the websites I have studied four spheres; Services, Contact, Structure and General viewpoints.

Title: What is important knowledge in social studies- An analyse of opinions among teachers in social studiesThe aim of this paper is to increase the awareness about how teachers in Social studies think about goals and substance in the subject. I also want to get a picture about what kinds of problems teacher?s experiences when teaching Social studies. My expectations told me that Social studies are complex to teach, because it derives from several university disciplines such as Political science, Economics, Sociology, Law and Geography, which I believe makes the subject harder to define and what to give priority to. Finally, I want to increase the awareness, if it seems to be any fundamental essence in Social studies as a subject.To achieve my goals with this paper I have studied relevant literature about Social studies.

Principles that guide how a classification system should be structured have existed for more than a century. Traditional classification principles can be of great value for the design of classification schemes directories on the web. However, there are differences between the library context in which these principles originated, and the web. This thesis aims at investigating how changes in the context of classification affect the application of traditional principles of classification on the web. Another purpose is to see what implications this has for the design of classification schemes on the web.

Swedish schools have during the last few years started to providing pupils in high school with tablet-computers. By doing interviews I examine how pupils in high school use tablet-computers in different ways and how that affect their studies. From a sociocultural perspective and with the concept of artefacts I analyze how suitable tablet-computers are for studies on this level of education. My results show that the tablet-computers are used as the pupils primary study tool. They are available to all pupils and can be used in most parts of their studies and this creates new opportonities in how to interact with collective knowledge and with other people.

This thesis investigates young people´s (16-21) preferences in reading through a survey including interviews and questionnaires. The groups attitudes towards reading and libraries, their reading and library habits, and to what extent eight libraries had bought the preferred literature were also examined. Some reports from the 80´s were used to find the changes. The result shows that youngsters read and visit libraries somewhat more frequently. Trivial literature is not as dominant, more teenage-books were read.

This master thesis is written in the purpose to discover which attitudes the public libraries in Sweden and Denmark have towards offering popular music to their patrons, how they motivates their choices and why they make the choices they make. The essay focuses on the differences and similarities between the Swedish and Danish libraries and relates their attitudes to the Finnish researcher Sanna Taljas three discourses regarding music policies in libraries.We examined this by sending out a question sheet to public libraries in Sweden and Denmark, the questions were regarding popular music's place in the library and how they build up their music collection. The question sheets were sent out to a total of 116 libraries of which 46 were Danish.The conclusions we drew after our examination were that Danish and Swedish public libraries have a lot in common in the way they regard and distribute popular music in the public libraries. Both of the respondent groups puts user demand high on the priority list as well as having a collection that holds significant works of many genres..

The explosion of information technology has given users direct access to an ocean of information. Increased availability puts increasing demands on the ability of students and researchers to search for, filter, and structure information. In response, the role of the research library has shifted from being primarily an information resource to being an educational resource with a focus on teaching users what is known as information literacy. This thesis is a study of user-education at the Karolinska Institute Library KIB, the largest medical library in the Nordic countries. KIB has invested significant resources in developing user-education, and has a full-time user-education developer and a formal pedagogical platform for user-education.

The Internet offers an abundance of information. This information is easy to access in technical terms, however it is difficult to find. At present there is a wide variety of search services to choose from. This master's thesis is about selecting the appropriate search service for a certain question. Are different types of services suitable for different types of questions, and if so, which services for which questions?To answer this, I have undertaken one theoretical and one empirical study.

Which expectations did leading debaters place on fiction as an instrument in achieving societal changes hoped for by introducing the Public library? How can the value of fiction be described in relation to the mission of the Public library, according to these moulders of public opinion? Place and timeframe for this thesis is Sweden around the years 1905-1912 (period of formation of the Public library here according to the Anglo-American model). Starting point is the assumption that the Public library as a political institution is characterized by an ideological function. It produces meaning and norms, it sets standards of value. Method used is based on close reading and comparison.

The aim of this thesis was to look closer into the shelf arrangement and user behavior in a fiction collection with the municipal library in Lund as an example. The purpose was to investigate to what extent the shelf arrangement in this library is adapted to the behavior of users when it comes to searching for and choosing fiction. The study is mainly focused on the division between Hc- and Hce-classified books (Swedish fiction and fiction translated into Swedish), the special shelving of the publications of the last five years, and the genre categorization. The user behavior is primarily examined from the perspective of three search strategies; looking for a specific author or title, browsing within a genre or browsing without having a specific genre in mind. The study also deals with within which genres of fiction the users are searching and if they are looking for a book that is translated or not, new or older.

The aim of this meta-study is to present an overview of the methods used in Master theses written at The Swedish School of Library and Information Science at the University of Borås, where all Master theses from 1999, 2004, and 2009 has been studied. The aim includes examining if there is a connection between college (Swedish term: kollegium) belonging and methods used but also to examine and compare the qualitative and/or quantitative approaches to the methods. In the 252 Master theses studied, 353 different choices of method are recognized. After taking note of the methods, six categories are created in which the methods are placed. The categories are: Interview, IR-test, Observation, Studies of Text, Survey, and Other.

This report will focus on the folkhigh-school in its general form and the role of the libraries on these types of schools in particular. A library on folkhighschools have a tendency to be forgotten and ends up being somewhere in the middle of the libraryworld and the general educational organisations. The purpose of this essay is to examine and provide general views on the different roles that a library on a folkhighschool can have, as well as looking into the unique aspects of the type of school that a folkhighschool is in terms of influencing the libraries placed there. The methodology used in this study is qualitative. Interviews have been held on three different folkhighschools in south of Sweden.

This essay focuses on tourists' information seeking. The main focus was to examine whether there is a connection between how the informants in different tourist styles the different tourist styles are presented by Eva Wolf as the tourist of recreation, action, culture, compromise, and individualism seek information to their forthcoming vacation. The result was reached through a qualitative method, where ten informants with various tourist roles were interviewed separately. The informants were chosen by personal contacts. In addition to these interviews, three representatives from the tourist industry were contacted and interviewed by e-mail.