Aim: To examine director?s experiences of the process to implement smoke-free working hours and also their need of support to make it feasible in the municipality of Östhammar. Method: A qualitative interview study with a descriptive design was used. Semi-structured interviews were made with six directors who were selected from different levels, localities and administrations in the municipality of Östhammar. A qualitative content analysis was used to analyze the data.Results: Many positive aspects were pointed out regarding the implementation of smoke-free working hours.

During my time as a student at the School of Library and Information Science in Borås there was an ongoing discussion regarding whether or not the library and librarian were facing an identity crisis and what future consequences this may lead to. The discussion was and still is of interest to me since it most likely will have an impact on the identity I soon will make part of my self as a professional librarian. This master?s thesis is an attempt that to through discourse analysis seek clarity in what the future identity of the library and the librarian may consist of. I do so by examining articles from the two library journals Ikoner and Biblioteksbladet.

The aim of this master thesis has been to investigate discussions about public access to Internet in public libraries. Areas of interest were the debate in Sweden as well as in the United States. The approach was qualitative and questionnaires were distributed by e-mail to a number of Swedish public libraries. The results from the survey were then supplemented with a theoretical background and a literature study. The usable questionnaires obtained from 20 libraries showed a rather uniform approach among the Swedish librarians of how the Internet is best provided by public libraries.

The aim of this Master's thesis is to examine the user discourses that can be identified in the public library field. Questions posed in this study are: what discourses can be found, what characterises them, how are users categorised and what does this categorisation imply. The theoretical starting-point is Ernesto Laclaus and Chantal Mouffes discourse theory. The method is text analytic. 62 articles from three library journals - Biblioteksbladet, Bibliotek i Samhälle and Ikoner are analysed through a model in four phases.

The usability of the Internet increases for every year. The Weblog phenomenon makes it possible for anyone to easily publish, find information and get in touch with other people through the net. This Essay treats the possibilities the Weblog medium offer Swedish libraries and librarians in library contexts. The purpose of the study is to examine the Web phenomenon: Weblogs, and their significance for a total of eleven Library Heads and librarians together with their view on the Weblog activity at each library connected Weblog, to get comprehension and new knowledge on the usability of Weblogs in the library sector. The foundation for the Essay consists of a qualitative interview study, built on asynchronous e-mail interviews and telephone interviews with blogging librarians and Heads of libraries.

The purpose of this master?s thesis is to examine what needs and expectations the patrons have on the local public library services for adult students. With increased knowledge of these matters the library will be able to support and improve the service for users. The focus is on adult students with immigrant background who study Swedish as second language in a municipal adult education school. The main questions are: How do adult students use the library at present? What do they consider to be most important when using the public library for their studies? How do these expectations correspond to their experience of the library services? Two focusgroups and one in-depth interview were carried out.

This master thesis is a study of the Swedish Lending Centre for immigrant literature (ILC), which opened in 1991. The purpose of the thesis is to examine problems and possibilities in the organization of ILC, which has a number of powerful stakeholders. In this study focus has been on the development of the organization, and especially on the planning of the conversion of the non-public Lending Centre to a library open to public (to be called the International Library in Stockholm) that will be inaugurated in May 2000. ILC is governmentally financed, but incorporated in the organization of the public library in Stockholm. Other stakeholders, except the Swedish Government and Stockholm City, are the County of Stockholm, the staff of ILC, and the public libraries that use the Centre's long-distance-lending facilities.

The aim of this Master's thesis is to discuss and analyse co-operation between public and academic libraries. The political changes that were initiated during 2004 have come to alter the conditions for Swedish libraries. The Swedish library law was changed at the 1st of January 2005 and co-operation between libraries is now statuary even if there is no description of how the new mission is to be executed. At the same time an extensive report about the Royal Library and its role as the Swedish National Library was presented. This report also recommended an increased co-operation between different types of libraries.

The main purpose of this study is to investigate and understand how technology students handle information especially when they are working with their Masters thesis. A further purpose is to examine how technology students use library resources of the Linköping University. The research method used is grounded theory, where description of the method is an integral part of the study. Twelve qualitative interviews were made with newly qualified graduates from the engineering programs of Linköping Institute of Technology. The respondents were divided into two groups, A and B, with six in each group.

During the late 1990s a movement with the intention of forming independent libraries emerged on Cuba. They were seen as an alternative to the public libraries which were supposed to be suffering from censorship by the Cuban government. The purpose of this thesis is to compile and bring structure in a debate regarding public libraries on Cuba and what have become known as independent libraries. In this thesis a textual analysis has been approached for examining articles, websites and reports concerning what attitudes and position the library support organizations Friends of Cuban Libraries FCL, Cuban Libraries Solidarity Group CLSG and IFLA/FAIFE have regarding the two different library types. These positions is throughout the survey connected with the concept of intellectual freedom.

Discussions about the democratic deficit of the European Union have gotten more intense and the criticism usually points towards a great gap between the citizens and the EU politics. In this study the political communication policy is being put under the scope to investigate to what extent the policy is designed to counter the democratic deficit, supported by the theory of deliberative democracy. The analysis examines three aspects of the deficit ? decentralization, participation and the distribution of information ? and makes research into the communicative measures that have been implemented. The importance for EU to make deliberation possible is stressed throughout the essay and in the conclusion I argue that improvements still need to be made.  .

In this two years master?s thesis I examine the library?s representation of research and its influence upon the relationship between the library practice and the research practice. I also intend to find out what controls the representation and if it is possible to see changes in the representation over time. My source material has been texts published in the Swedish library journal ? and social domain ? Biblioteksbladet during the last decennium (2001?2011).

This study examines the cultural place and status of video and computer games in the Swedish public library. Using works on popular culture and the theories of Pierre Bourdieu, this study employs quantitative methods, as well as textual analysis, to analyze the results of an online questionnaire with 19 questions focusing on selection criteria, shelf placement, perceived competence, as well as reasoning for having or not having these games in the library. 286 out of the 440 libraries contacted is participating in the study, and the libraries consist exclusively of public libraries in Sweden that are found in the database of the Royal Library.The results of this study show that a larger number of libraries than previously indicated have started to provide electronic games to their patrons. At the same time, patterns in the data and comments suggests that these games in many cases still do not enjoy the same level of cultural recognition as other media. Indicative of this is the way most libraries seem to focus on the medium being exclusively for their young patrons, with seem-ingly very little in the way of investment for adults.

The aim of this study is to examine the significance of having a music department at the public library in Enköping, and how the organization of the phonograms is handled. The different areas examined are the reason of the reintroduction of a music department, its budget, its users, the work with selection, the marketing, statistical data concerning loans, the work with classification, indexing, and organization of the phonograms and the future of the music department. The empirical material consists of qualitative interviews with staff connected to the music department at the public library in Enköping. For the theoretical frame, Sanna Taljas discourse analysis of music libraries in Finland is used. Talja presents three discourses which all show different views on what kind of material a music library should contain.

The aim of this master thesis is to study the students usage and experiences of the reference services at the university library at Linköping University. The four questions that I seek answers to are: - What kind of help do the students most often ask for at the reference desk? - To what extent do the students use the reference services for their studies? - What are the students experiences of the help they receive at the reference desk? - What are the students experiences of the treatment they receive from the librarians at the reference desk? I have studied literature that describes reference work and evaluation of reference work. I have also studied Christian Grönroos theory of service quality. I have distributed questionnaires to students at Linköping University.