The purpose of this Master thesis is to examine whether the term elasticity is relevant and functional to apply to public library organisations. Another aim of the thesis is to relate the term elasticity to public library organisations in a network society. Sociologist Manuel Castells provide the theoretical framework on the network society. Three investigations (meant to complement each other) in two Swedish public libraries seek to give answers to these questions.To be able to examine which areas of public library activity are elastic, I make a rough definition of what public library organisations consist of ? nine activity fields are identified using IFLA?s guidelines in combination with Swedish law of public libraries.

The underlying purpose of this study is to see whether a library focused solely on providing literature in other languages than Swedish serves as a unifying, integrating force, or as an agent for division and exclusion. The study focuses on the International Library in Stockholm. The authors have created a profile of the visitors of the selected library, concerning their characteristics, their library habits and their perceptions of the International library. This profile has then been compared with the staff?s perception of the visitors as a group.

The Swedish public library was founded in the years when the society in Sweden went from being a society of agriculture to industrialism. Modernism was sweeping over the country, everything was possible, which influenced the new society that was built. Now Sweden was going to be a true democracy with responsible and empathic citizens. One of the main tools in this process was to educate people, to get them to read and write and the public library fitted very well into these new ideas. It represented a place, free of charge, where everyone could go to take part of the knowledge and cultural learning that they needed in order to become the citizen that the society required.

This two years master?s thesis is about book circles for children, arranged by the public libraries in Sweden. The purpose is to gain knowledge about how children experience their participation in book circles, and how they experience their own reading. It focuses on children aged 10 to 12 years, and their leisure reading. The research questions are: What are the book circles? function for the participants? How and why do the children read? What kind of literature do they like? Do the children experience that their reading has developed through their participation in the book circles? What parts of the reading process do the book circles influence?The theoretical framework is threefold.

The purpose of this masters thesis is to study two subject gate-ways within the field of Swedish higher education and academic research, concerning structuring and selection of Internet resources to facilitate information retrieval for their target groups, and also to study two co-operation projects in the same field, one national and one European, to see how the co-operation is being carried through and how the gateways in the projects can serve from a wider perspective. The gateways, AGORA and NOVAGate, are being studied mainly by their Web sites and two e-mail interviews with persons responsible for the gateways. Facts about the national project are principally based on an interview with BIBSAM. The European Renardus is being studied out of articles and information on the Web site. From the results of the study it is being clear that the purpose of the gateways is to make a quality-selection of information accessible via the Internet and thereby facilitate for their target groups to find usable information.

The main purpose of this Master?s thesis is to do a benchmarking study of the marketing activities at the public library of Valdemarsvik. The purpose is also to describe and get a deeper understanding of benchmarking as a method for improving library activity. Four major problem areas are addressed: How can one use benchmarking as a tool to achieve change? How can one learn with benchmarking? What similarities and differences are there between benchmarking and other similar methods for competence development? Is benchmarking better than other similar methods for competence development? The empirical approach was qualitative and the method chosen was action research.

The aim of the study is to examine ideas surrounding copyright law and related rights appearing in the referral statements that the participants of the library sphere gave to the department writ Ds 2003:35. These ideas reflect the positions the library sphere take regarding issues surrounding the copyright law and related rights. The department writ was preceded by a directive from the European Union; Directive 2001/29/EC of the European parliament and of the council of 22 may 2001 on the harmonization of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society. The writ Ds 2003:35 was later followed by a proposition from the government which was co-herent with the preceding writ. The empirical material has been analyzed with a starting point in the polarizations, artist/audience, private/public and original/copy, presented in PhD Martin Fredriksson?s book Skapandets rätt.

The aim of this thesis is to explore the concept of the work and the problems with the definition of it. The concept is an important starting-point when it comes to cataloguing musical works and creating uniform titles. Another aim is to find out other difficulties that are frequent in cataloguing printed music. In the theoretical part of this thesis Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records FRBR and the Swedish cataloguing rules KRS are important tools. The FRBR-model and the four entities work, expression, manifestation and item are described.

The purpose of this study is to find out how libraries can be user-friendly to people with dyslexia by focusing on how adult dyslectics experience the library. Data were collected through literature and interviews with adult dyslectic students. Two different types of user studies served as a theoretical framework; one was an individual-related study by professor Wilson and the other was a system-related one from professor Buckland. The findings in this study shows that dyslectic library users often experience difficulties when seeking for materials in the library, due to the libraries organisation of material according to the written language. Through technical aid and a more user-friendly organisation of materials it may be easier to find relevant material for dyslectics.

The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate the present importance of liberal education in the Swedish "folkhögskola" by studying its expressions in the teaching of literature and fiction. I have interviewed teachers at four different schools about their opinions of liberal education, literature and cultural heritage, means of instruction, and influence of their students. Liberal education in this thesis is considered as a process. Starting from our own experiences we meet something strange to us and while absorbing this in our experiences we change. But its purpose also is to convey the canon of Western literature.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the problems in multilingual thesauri, with a focus on the problem of conceptual equivalence between different languages. This study compares the problems and solutions that have been carried out in the Eurovoc multilingual thesaurus with the ISO 5964 ISO 5964 is a guideline for establishment and development of multilingual thesauri. The Swedish descriptors in the subject area "education and communication", from Eurovoc have been observed and compared with the guidelines recommendations. The results show that, the majority of the investigated Swedish descriptors do not present any problem. Most of the terms that are used as descriptors are found in dictionaries and glossaries or appear with high frequency in Swedish websites.

This evaluational study has been initiated by the County Council of Gävleborg (LandstingetGävleborg), politically responsible (and the main economical) authority of BibliotekGävleborg, the regional library institution in the county of Gävleborg, Sweden.The aim of the study is threefolded:1. to evaluate the organization of Bibliotek Gävleborg during the 1990's as we11 as theeffects of a reorganization carried out in 1990, and, through the use of interviews and a questionnaire, to ascertain the attitudes of Bibliotek Gävleborg's branch users (mainlythe municipal libraries in the county) towards the organizational development.2. to evaluate and compare regional library activities in Gävleborg prior to and duringthe 1990's, and to investigate the attitudes of the afore-mentioned branch users towardsBibliotek Gävleborg's activities.3. to investigate and discuss possible future directions of regional library development in Sweden in general, and in Gävleborg in particular.The closing, debating chapter in the study also'contains a few suggestions of measures to enhance regional library activity in Gävleborg..

This thesis discusses main problems associated with dictionary-based Cross-Language Information Retrieval as lexical and translational ambiguity of query terms, translation of compounds and phrases, dictionary limitation. The purpose of the study is to investigate how query structure influences the effectiveness of CLIR regarding performance of three query types: original query, unstructured query and structured query. Query structuring refers to the application of #syn-operator to group query terms. The study comprises an experiment that was performed in the InQuery IR system with TrecUta database that contains 550,000 news articles from different American newspapers. 24 topics were used for the experiment.

The main aim of this master thesis was to see the process of an interactive online reference service from idea to final product. The reference service we have studied is developed and used by the Library of the National Institute for Working Life in Stockholm, Sweden and goes by the name phibi. Our goal was to review the whole realization process from the reasons why a service like this was created, how the service was introduced and implemented inside the organisation and finally what the result and consequences were for both the library staff and for the users of the service. Phibi is designed to be a tool that fosters communication between the library staff and the remote users where the users get the opportunity to be helped with their questions by the library staff although they are not physically present in the library. To understand the process we conducted a case study with 11 interviews of the library staff, the superior and the initiator to phibi.

In this two years masters thesis in Library and Information Studies, the Russian Library-Bibliographical Classification (LBC/BBK) and the Chinese Library Classification (CLC) are analyzed with regard to their historical and ideological backgrounds and their respective evolutions. The structure of these classifications is compared with the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), as well as three chosen subjects (History, Politics and Religion). A qualitative comparative textual method is used.The study shows that these classification schemes, created at different times, different parts of the world, and different political systems, have different biases but give priority to the European before other foreign views. Otherwise, they often use a proximity principle. The CLC and the LBC were originally based on Marxist materialist principles but built in totally different ways.