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.

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 main purpose of this bachelor?s thesis is to examine how Swedish upper secondary school librarians and related staff relate to the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia. The research is placed in the all-embracing context of information literacy and source criticism on the Internet. The study was carried out in the form of qualitative interviews and based on two theoretical bases: firstly, the concept of cognitive authority stipulated by Patrick Wilson, and secondly the idea that Wikipedia has a draw towards late modern epistemological assumptions. The latter theory was also associated with the perceptions of knowledge among the library staff interviewed.

The aim of this thesis is to mediate to the reader an image of Chinese classification systems and in what way the methods of classification have progressed during time. The tradition of classification in China is very old and dates back more than two thousand years, but it wasnt until the downfall of the dynastic era in the beginning of the 20th century, that Chinese libraries and methods of classification were modernized. This thesis also identifies the development of Chinese librarianship which is of old age since Chinese literature stretches three thousand years back. The main question is in what way the values of three different philosophies are reflected in five classification systems compiled between 1953-1975. The three philosophies are Daoism, Confucianism and Maoism/Mao Zedong Thought.

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.

Integration projects at two libraries: multiculture, meetings and possibilities takes its start in the fact that Sweden is populated with people from many different nations. The libraries have a unique possibility to arrange integration projects as a supplier of culture and information. This case study focuses on two integration projects arranged by two libraries; the library of Jönköping with the project Brobyggarbiblioteken, and the library of Kortedala which was involved in the project Ordbron. My purpose is to find out how these two libraries chose to work with integration, migrants and multiculture. The aim is to examine if the library could function as a passway to the Swedish society, and to find out if the library can facilitate for migrants to maintain contact with their native country.

This essay focuses on how trafficking is defined and dealt with in recent European policies,and particularly how prostitution take part of these discursive developments. Treaties andagreements on trafficking in human beings and for sexual exploitation have been made bythe European Union and United Nations amongst others, which have been signed andratified by the EU countries in Action Plans. In this essay, five national Actions Plans, fromAustria, Great Britain, Poland, Spain and Sweden between 2007 and 2009, have beencompared in order to see similarities and differences in how the phenomenon of traffickingis done through language. Based on Discourse theory and focus on discursive struggles, theresult show a hegemony around trafficking as a social issue in the Action Plans studied,exploiting humans, mainly children and women, sexually, but also how trafficking is framedas a problem of the nation state and the domestic labour market. It is also illustrated howdifferent meanings of prostitution make the trafficking discourse antagonistic and contested.Finally, the essay discusses the trafficking discourse in relation to EU strivings towardsharmonisation and power imbalances of migration and economy in Europe..

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..

The purpose of the master thesis was to reflect and analyze music library activities and policies in the public libraries in the area around the city of Borås, in the south-western part of Sweden. With this thesis I also wanted to look at the interaction between the public libraries, the music school and the music associations in the same area. To investigate these matters, qualitative method was used in the form of interviews with seven librarians from seven different libraries and five representatives of different local music organizations. Other methods used were observations and source studies. The literature used discusses the role of the music department of public libraries as well as that of a music librarian working in a public library.

This Master thesis aims to study the relation between Swedish governmental cultural policy and cultural events at two Swedish public libraries. The Masters thesis demonstrates how national cultural policy regulates every part of the public library. This demonstration is a result based upon national cultural policy documents and interviews with employees at two public libraries in Sweden. The conclusion that national cultural policy regulates this part of the public library is drawn with help of the circle of culture as applied in Culture Studies and Michel Foucault theories of power. The thesis contains the answer of four questions, two involving cultural policy and the other two events at the library.

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 the Swedish school library discussion, the most prominent role of the school library haslong been that of cultural centre in the school, with the main goal being to encourage children'sreading. During the 90ies there were signs of a shift in focus to the role of information centre,giving active support across the whole range of the curriculum, in the independent researchingwork of the students. At the same time severe budget cuts caused great worries for the future.The interest for the school library media centres increased during this time, many differentorganizations said they wanted to fight for better school libraries. The purpose of the presentwork was to find out who they are, what they want and what their ideal school library lookslike. Fourteen organizations were studied, focus was on activities during 1995.

The purpose of this master thesis is to investigate how the public library can support adult learning through collaboration with other actors in the community. This is done by examining the activity of Linköping municipal library towards the user group adult students. The questions raised consider; the political view of supporting adult learning, the role of the public library, who are the actors in Linköping, the experiences of collaboration and finally what promotes and restrains collaboration. The investigation is done as a case study with qualitative methods. The qualitative methods was found to be the most appropriate for this study, since the majority of the empirical material has been collected through interviews.

The essay is about the Nobel Library's investments in fiction, the change of certain linguisticareas since 1904 and the purchase policy of the Library. The paper contains an introductoryhistorical chapter, where I describe the history of the Swedish Academy, the life and willof Alfred Nobel and in conclusion a description of the Nobel library of the Swedish Academy.When writing this essay I have used a combined qualitative and quantitative method, meaningthat I have interviewed the librarians of the Nobel Library, studied the purchase catalogues,and kept statistics over the books.in different linguistic areas purchased since 1904 onwardwith an emphasize on years ending with "4". The outcome of this survey is that the purchaseof books within the different speech areas doesn't vary as much as first expected, and thatthere rises and falls within all the linguistic areas which could be further explored..