The public library´s overall purpose and legitimacy is analways relevant subject for discussion in Library andInformation Science and in public debate on libraries.Libraries are a part of a bigger societal context and are thusinevitably influenced by societal changes. In this thesis wehave studied different roles and functions of the publiclibrary, as seen from documents published by one specificpublic library in Malmö - Garaget. As basis we have usedan analysis model of the library in the knowledge andexperience society made by Jochumsen, HvenegaaardRasmussen och Skot-Hansen (2010). Our purpose has beento examine which ideas and notions on the functions of thepublic library that can be found in Garaget?s documents andin the model ? and to discuss them from a discoursive pointof view.

This essay aims to examine how science fiction literature is supported and made available for readers at four public libraries. Each library has its own opinion of what a public library?s role in society is, and that affects how literature acquisition and media exposure is done at that particular library. To explore this, the author uses a modified version of Elzinga and Andersson?s theory of traditionalism, pragmatism and emancipationism.

This thesis is structured as a combined empirical and literary study. The aim is to investigate how children at the age of 11-12 years reflect on their readings of fiction and how these reflections relate to the librarians' perspective of a child's reading ability and reading development. Qualitative interviews with children and librarians constitute the empirical part. Research and theories are compared to the empirical part then placed into a more extensive context. How do children at the age of 11-12 years old reflect upon their reading of fiction and how do librarians relate themselves to this age? An analysis using interviews, research and theories is used to answer these questions.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine and analyse how the public librarys mission is interpreted and formulated in a selection of library related journals. The journals are both international scientific referee journals from the LIS field and journals with a closer connection to the practitioners within the public library field. The idea is that these journals can be seen as windows to an academic theoretic perspective on public libraries, as well as to the practitioners way of talking about the librarys mission. The study also aims to examine if there is a difference in the way that the librarys mission is interpreted and discussed among theorists and among practitioners within the field. The theoretical starting-point is Ernesto Laclaus and Chantal Mouffes discourse theory, and the method is text analytic.

This thesis is a contribution to the discussion on the public library?s institutional identity in late modernity. The aim is to shed light on the public library?s identity as expressed through its public events. The thesis seeks to answer the following questions: What kind of public events are offered at public libraries? What themes distinguish the content of these events? What characterizes the institutional identity expressed through these events? In addition to the concept of institutional identity, a model of four library spaces, developed by Skot-Hansen, Hvenegaard Rasmussen, and Jochumsen, constitutes the theoretical framework of this thesis.

Sweden is today often defined as a multicultural society. The implications on organizing and providing information in public libraries are many, since the systems presently used in the western hemisphere are not adapted to multi-cultural information. This thesis aims to outline ethical and practical problems that arise when organising and providing information concerning cultures other than western, and not least, when dealing with material in other scripts. With this theoretical framework the thesis examines the website of the International Library in Stockholm, a website built to serve users of different languages and scripts than Swedish. The research questions in this thesis are: 1, what specific problems can be distinguished within library work in a multicultural and multilingual environment? 2, what problems and needs were considered in the creation and design of the International Library?s website? And 3, can examples of problems and possible solutions of these be seen in the information and it?s organisation on the International Library?s website? The empiric material consists of the International Library?s website, and interviews with three informants involved in developing it.

The aim of this study is to explain and analyse political steering of public libraries in Swedish municipalities and the roles of politicians and administrators in this process. To fulfil this purpose five municipalities have been studied. It is argued that both politicians and administration have to be included in a study of steering and that the relation between politicians and administrators should be seen as an interplay. Planning and evaluation are discerned as the two main activities in the steering process. The material in this study consists mainly of information collected through interviews with library responsible politicians and library managers in all five municipalities.The results show that libraries are considered politically uncontroversial and that politicians see little need for political interference and steering.

This thesis aims to identify bottlenecks in the internal communication of aSwedish public library. Specifically, it addresses the behaviour of the library staff when they seekfor work-oriented information through interaction with their colleagues. A fundamental assumptionof this study is that the information-seeking process depends on organisational culture. I have madean exploratory case study in a medium-sized Swedish public library, where relevant issues areidentified and correlated with the culture of the organisation.I have used Schein's three-level model to describe the culture of the library; this model definesculture as a set of basic assumptions and the actions of people as expressions of their culture. Datafor the study were gathered using several approaches, including interviews with the library staff andobservations of them.

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 aim of this Master's thesis is to examine the contemporary educational tasks of the Swedish public library as they manifest in Swedish library journals. Our main question at issue is: Which educational discourses are there? And in relation to our main question: how do the concepts of information literacy, lifelong learning and adult education relate to each other? Is there an antagonism between the public library's duty to supply fiction as opposed to non-fiction? and: What are the consequences of these discourses in the service provided by the library?Our theoretical starting-point is the discourse theory as proposed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. We analyse 39 texts from four Swedish library journals: Ikoner, bis, DIK-forum and Biblioteksbladet. The analysis is done in two phases.

The aim of my master?s thesis has been to examine the situation of the price lists in the National Library of Sweden, in Uppsala University Library and in the Nordiska Museet Library. The starting point was that the institutes have been operating within different institutional practices. These operational differences between the institutes have affected the collecting, the organizing and the accessibility to the information of the price lists. My master?s thesis is based on Birger Hjørlands theories of domains and knowledge organization.

The purpose of this study is to examine what readers of fiction literature are influenced by when they choose books. What libraries and bookstores do to influence readers in their choice of literature and how readers perceive the librarys and the bookstores influence on them in their choice of fiction literature. We have also studied which factors outside the library and the bookstore that readers are influenced by when borrowing or buying a certain book and to what extent readers are influenced by the books appearance. To answer our questions we chose a public library and a bookstore, where we interviewed six persons in each place. We have interviewed a librarian and a bookstore manager for information about how these two cultural institutions work with marketing of their fiction literature.

The aim of this thesis is to examine librarians' view on the knowledge and competence required at a small public library and how they look upon their education in retrospect. Library education in the 1970's and 1980's was mainly practical, a vocational training, but since 1995 the education results in an academic degree in Library & Information Science. Due to this, we focus on the ongoing generation shift in Swedish libraries as an aspect of knowledge and education. The empirical study is based on interviews with librarians working in minor public libraries. The informants form two groups, based on their education; ?old? ones and ?new? ones.

The aim of this Master thesis is to describe why and how public librariesuse the social networks Facebook and Twitter. The focus is to study whatbrought about their use, how the work is carried out, ideas and objectivesbehind the use and what libraries actually convey on the networks. Themethodology is twofold: semi-structured interviews with responsiblepersonnel at four Swedish public libraries, and an ethnographic contentanalysis of four months of the libraries' status updates and tweets onFacebook and Twitter. The theoretical framework consists of a model forthe roles of the public library in society, and of discourses about thepublic library in media.Results indicate that social networks are used to market, make accessibleand inform of the library's resources and services. Furthermore, networksare used to communicate/interact with followers and to inspire people toread.

In this thesis I investigate what librarians working with children do for six-year-olds at the libraries in order to stimulate them to read. I also investigate how children of this age read and what books are like for these beginners. The background for the thesis is that reading decreased a lot in ages three to eight during the 1980s and 1990s. My aim is to see what projects, methods and other strategies there are to get children to read. The method used is case study.