The general view of learning has dramatically changed during the last two decades. Today we talk about learning for life and educate to meet the demands of the information society. This new view forces us to constantly relearn and develop new knowledge ? something which has resulted in large restructuring within the upper secondary school. New forms of teaching, where the pupils are given the opportunity to a more active search for knowledge, is developing.

The purpose of this Master thesis is to examine what knowledge and competence employers at public libraries apprehend that recent graduates of Library and information science (LIS) have. We want to illuminate what qualifications employers demand and expect from LIS graduates and to what degree employers find that LIS graduates correspond to these demands. Our aim is also to see how these qualifications can be categorized and understood. Finally, we try to picture the employers? apprehensions of the education received at LIS.As a method of gathering material for the analysis, we sent qualitative inquires with open questions to employers at public libraries in Sweden.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine in what way the introducing of library plans in three municipalities have affected the work in library organizations. We base our study on a new institutionalist perspective, which focuses on changes in organizations from a social and interpretative perspective. By using this theoretical framework, it is possible to study how interpersonal relations affect the development in library organizations. Through qualitative interviews with ten librarians, we investigate how the establishing of library plans has influenced, and been influenced by, the library field and by the environment, i.e.

This thesis will portray the different types of students at the programs of library studiesin Lund and Umeå.The study is based upon quantitative information gathered from a survey, which wasdistributed to first-year students in Lund and Umeå. The survey was followed by qualitativeinterviews with four students, and with the director of studies from each school.The study shows that the programs, as we11 as the students, are very similar, althoughthere are some minor differences. It seemed that the students at Umeå were moreinterested in culture than those at Lund.A certain connection between the aim at information and the ownership of a computercould be detected. The sex of the students played a major part in their choice of education.The attractors and facilitators, used by Lortie in his study, could also be appliedto the students at the program of library studies in our thesis..

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to make an outline of different methods and theories within the field of bibliometrics and critically review their strengths and weaknesses. The author studied literature that discussed bibliometric methods and theories. The number of empirical studies that are based on bibliometric methods and theories are numerous and where principally excluded, but some empirical studies were included as part of the argumentation for and against different methods and theories. The author first gives an outline of which methods and theories there are and describes their different strengths and weaknesses. Citation analysis has many different fields of application such as information retrieval, mapping science, evaluative studies and monitoring literature.

Our intention with this work has been to examine if books in one particular subject share the same ideology, or if they contain several different ideologies. We have chosen to study and analyse books that deal with death and grief. We suggest that we will get an idea of how society looks upon death by examine how death is presented in books for young children. We have studied and adopted well-known writers on the topic to give sufficient background to our research. In the main public library of Gothenburg we found the latest bookindex of different themes recommended by Bibliotekstjänst.

The aim of this Master's thesis is to examine how blogs are used by public libraries for marketing purposes, and how librarians who blog perceive their blog as a marketing tool. The thesis is based on a qualitative study conducted using asynchronous e-mail interviews with librarians representing eleven different library blogs. The theoretical framework and concepts are taken from marketing theory, including Kotler's marketing mix, relationship marketing, and theories on the marketing of non-profit organisations, knowledge organizations, the Internet, and blogs. Our results and analysis reveal that libraries use blogs because they are an easy tool to use, they represent a new way to inform users about the library, they are a way to improve contact with the users and a way to reach potential users. According to the librarians we interviewed, blogs can be used to market libraries in a number of different ways: by disseminating information on the library and its various media and events, by providing a forum to demonstrate the skills of the librarians, and as a way of changing the image of the library.

"What's feminine about the Women's library?" This library, Kvinnobiblioteket, is abranchoffice at Björkskatan in the city of Luleå, and the introducing question is thestartingpoint of this essay. To find some possible answers is its object.One way of describing what's feminine about Kvinnobiblioteket is through presenting itsobjective, ambitions and methods of working. That is done mostly in a chapter headlined"Kvinnobiblioteket", and shows how the women's perspective concerns for exarnplepurchase of books and magazines, displaying of books, the opening hours, design etc.Although the focus in the survey is not in the former kind of description, but in the interviewsbeing made during a two week long period of time with ten women at Kvinnobiblioteket(both library user and personnel) at spring 1995. The results of the interviewsthen have been compared with theories from psychological-, feminist-, literature- andLibrary and information sciences, as we11 as to former surveys and essays.The material together leads to some keywords that seem to be important when trying tofind out what's female about the women's library.

The main purpose with this MA thesis is to examine how visually impaired, disabled and people with dyslexia define service quality at the public library of Linköping. The method that has been used is focus group interviews. A focus group consists of four to eight people who are joined together, without knowing each other before, to discuss a certain subject. The aim is to get a wide spread of answers. A secondary purpose is to examine how this method works.

The aim of the thesis is to examine the Swedish publiclibrary-debate between 1965 and 1975, with a focus on theinfluence of the New Left movement. The empirical materialconsists of articles from two library journals, and is studiedwith the intent to achieve knowledge of the library ideologyexpressed in context of the socialist movements of the 1960sand 70s. The method used is ideology analysis. Threedifferent areas of debate have been included in the study:issues pertaining to library holdings, problems concerning theworkplace and social and outreach activities.Some of the salient and key ideas that often recurs in thematerial touch upon the dangers of mass market literature, thenecessity for an expanded workplace democracy, theimportance of social work and the need for a more politicallyactive library. The bureaucracy, centralism and authoritariantendencies in the library world are criticized, as well as thenotion that the library should remain a politically neutralinstitution.

The aim of this masters thesis is to study the reliability of the URL as the link between a bibliographic record and a web resource. The Swedish catalogue services LIBRIS and NetSök have been evaluated on three different occasions, to study how these services have succeeded in giving access to web resources by using URLs. Because URLs are changeable, we have tried to find out common characteristics of the URLs in broken links. To accomplish this study we have used a quantitative approach and evaluated five percent of the web resources in the catalogues using a random selection. We have also used documentation relevant for our study, among other things to illustrate previous studies of the nature of web resources and alternative solutions to URLs as access points to web resources.

This dissertation discusses head librarians in Swedish public libraries and the stress factors which affect them. The aim is to map out potential stress factors which head librarians come across in their day-to-day work. The purpose of the dissertation is to answer the following question: what stress factors affect library managers in Swedish public libraries? The dissertation was conducted through a literature study, informal interviews and a quantitative questionnaire. The results of the quantitative questionnaires show that the factor that produces the highest level of stress is having too many different tasks.

This Masters thesis deals with query expansion in an online library catalogue. The aim of the study was to compare the retrieval effectiveness of four different query types when applied to the online library catalogue of the University College of Borås. The query types were: an initial query, the initial query with right hand truncation, the initial query expanded with synonyms and finally the initial query expanded with synonyms and right hand truncation. 24 topics were formulated, and four queries for each topic were constructed. The records retrieved by the searches were judged with regard to topicality, and were judged to be non-relevant, partially relevant or relevant.

The goal of this Masters thesis is to examine how people at the production department of Arkivator Falköping AB perceive the internal organisational communication transfer and exchange of information, by means of a communication audit. The objectives are also to characterise the communication climate and the respondents satisfaction with the internal organisational communication within the organisation. The results of the study are compared with the companys information policy and with previous research in organisational communication. Answers from different demographic groups within the population are compared. The communication audit was conducted using a modified and added version of a questionnaire originally compiled by the International Communications Association.

This is an investigation into the ways in which a group of librarians experience and make use of the intranet in their vocational role. The theoretical frame of reference consists of a model of how professionals seek information, which is based on a role-theory. As a method, I have applied a qualitative case-study. Using semi-structured qualitative interviews I have interviewed five librarians and the webmaster responsible for the intranet in their library. I have investigated how elements such as the age and vocational role of the librarians affect their use of the intranet.