BarnOPAC is a Swedish library interface for children. It was launched in public libraries in Sweden in 2001 and has now become a part of library software equipment in several public libraries. The purpose of the thesis is to investigate the interface BarnOPAC on the basis of the childrens perspective. The questions raised consider: how children experience and handle this interface, how library staff experience it and what viewpoints librarians have on childrens use of it. For this purpose we implemented a user study including eight children using the interface in a school library.

In an international perspective the Russian children s library is a unique institution, being solely committed to children up to 14 years of age. In Russia of today it is, however, being exposed to hard pressure as the economical and social conditions have changed dramatically since the collapse of the USSR. My interest lies in examining this change of living conditions for the children s libraries and how this in turn affect their work and role in the present state. In order to view this change in a longer perspective, I compare the situation for children s libraries during the time of communist regime with that of today using documents about and from children s libraries. I have studied its legal position and conditions, financial and political state, and how the modern society affects children and youth, especially their daily cultural life.

The aim of this two years master thesis in Library and Information Science is to examine how librarians and library managers in the three Stockholm suburbs of Alby, Fisksätra and Rinkeby think and reason about the role of public libraries in the integration process. The aim is also to examine whether their perception differ from that of local politicians at the municipal level. The theoretical framework is Marianne Andersson and Dorte Skot-Hanses model for analysis of the local library profile, and Jose Alberto Diaz theory on the integration process. The method used is qualitative interviews. The interviews were recorded and the content was analyzed using qualitative content analysis. The results of this study show that the library services in the three suburbs, rather than being stipulated by the legal demand for special services towards immigrants, are based on the needs of the local population.

This user study was carried out at the library at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg in the spring of 1999. Chalmers wanted to investigate how much their employees use electronic journals. To facilitate decision-making and be cost effective, the library needed to know about their customers' opinions. The main purpose was to investigate the usage of electronic journals, how the library's choice of these journals affects the frequency of use and what the attitudes towards them are. A questionnaire was sent out to 2 400 employees; 477 replies were received.

The purpose of this Master's thesis is to elucidate the phenomenon of storytelling and its methodology in the context of public library story-time for pre-school children. It also strives to give an insight into the functions of story-time both with regard to the storyteller and the participating children. The study is based on qualitative methods in the form of a literature analysis, observations and interviews. The interviews were undertaken with two storytellers from the same library who work with children up to three years old and children aged between four and six years. The result of the study suggests that storytelling is more appropriate than reading aloud in situations when large groups of children are involved.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to investigate the reasons for public libraries to have story-time today and also the reasons for story-time at the public library historically in Sweden. Why is the phenomenon of story-time still existing at public libraries today? The study is based on a questionnaire that was sent to childrens librarians in the Västra Götaland region. The material collected in this questionnaire was put together and resulted in six different categories showing the libraries purposes and thoughts of their story-time activities. The categories were: cultural heritage/tradition, joy of reading, language and imagination, library visits, storytelling and mutual experience.

This thesis explores different ways of navigation in virtual environments. It also investigates how virtual environments can support human memory. Tests are done using a self made virtual model of Orkanen Library, Malmö högskolas school library. Among the different navigation tests that were done, a visual guidance in form of a line on the ground leading to the goal is showed superior when navigating a virtual environment but that people prefer legible landmarks instead. Tests were also done which show that a 3D-model of a real location supports context based memory.

The purpose of this thesis is to construct a marketing model to be used both theoretically and practically when working with marketing in Swedish public libraries. This objective is achieved by first making a literature review of the written works on the marketing of libraries, and then studying the marketing activities at the public library in Bollebygd, Sweden. The theory is based on the marketing mix model the 7 ps, which serves as a framework for the presentation of the empirical result and the analysis. One of the questions posed in the beginning of the paper is how the library has worked with marketing over the past ten years. Through a combination of methods observation, textual studies and interviews the marketing activities employed at Bollebygds library are noted.

Sensory marketingAn effective instrument for libraries? We are living in a world of constant communication and information and because of that, marketing in general seem to have no distinctive effect. Consumers become overwhelmed by all the advertising messages. Due to this, it is clear that organizations like libraries must create a deeper and more personal connection to increase user satisfaction and foster the use of services, among both users and potential users. One way to achieve this is to make use of all the emotional elements of a product or a service.

In present-day situation many libraries use detectors so that they can be able to prevent attempts too take out books without registering them. The university library in Jonkoping is one of the libraries that have such a detector. But unfortunately it doesn?t always work correct and can also react on other things a part from books. This is a big problem since the library staff don?t have time to check all signals that comes from detector.

The aim of this thesis is to study what impact the USA Patriot act has had on American libraries. The authors intent has been to see what changes have occurred in the librarians work-routines and to study their attitudes toward the Patriot act. The authors have also intended to find out what the consequences would be for the libraries. The findings are related to Swedish circumstances. The material used in this thesis consists of six interviews conducted at three libraries in the Bay Area in California.

The main purpose of this study was to examine how preschool teachers are working to promote each child's language development and whether they can ensure that they do that. Therefore I wanted to find out what a good language development implies for each teacher, how they work to promote each child's language development in daily practice, how they measure the actual language development and also what conditions the teachers have, to engage in a language development way to work. For the study, I chose a qualitative method, with structured interviews and all together I interviewed six preschool teachers, within the same organization in a suburb close to Stockholm.  The results showed that there is an ambiguity, among the preschool teachers, in what a good language development means, but it can be stated that they do have a language development way to work even if it needs to be developed. Further on, it has emerged that the teachers have the tools to measure children's language development, although they do not have the conditions yet to use the method to the fullest. About the preschool teachers own conditions in order to operate in a language development way to work, I concluded that they have a strong foundation to build on, but they still have much work ahead of them.

The market for management training programs is growing and the supply of the service is increasing and getting further diversified. A consequence is a market with a wide variety of definitions of the very concept of development, and subsequently a wide variety of practices and methods to achieve development. The individuals that are subject to these programs seldom know what they are purchasing, or what to expect. When assuming a transfer of the developers view on development to the subject, a need for a greater understanding of the concept arises. The purpose of this thesis is to understand what views on development do exist among management trainers and map underlying dimensions of the views to increase the understanding of the concept of development.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate how libraries use thetools and ideas from library 2.0 in their reading promotionwork. We also want to include how librarians motivate thisuse and whatever merits and faults they encounter. We haveperformed document studies and interviews which we thenanalyzed with qualitative content analysis. Our theoreticframework in this study which we also used as a part of ourcoding scheme in the analysis was a model over the conceptlibrary 2.0 developed by Holmberg, Huvila, Kronquist-Bergand Widén-Wulff. This model describes seven aspects oflibrary 2.0 which is users, participation, library and libraryservice, web and web 2.0, social aspects, technology andinteractivity.

The purpose of this essay is to study the coming into being of two newly built public libraries in Sweden, Malmö public library and Linköping public library. In both cases, the architect was appointed through a competition. We have examined the degree of importance that one has put on the buildings functionality and aesthetics, respectively. Furthermore we have studied how the cooperation between library staff and the architects has worked, and finally we have studied to which degree the parties involved think that the interests of the users has been taken into concern. The first main chapter of the report is an overview of the literature found on the subject where we present theories on library architecture used in Sweden as well as abroad.