The aim of this Master's thesis was to examine the political and cultural reasons for making music materials compulsory at Danish public libraries by the new library act of 2000. The aim was also to examine how the public libraries have responded to this reform. To answer these questions a literature study was conducted as well as interviews. The results of the literature study indicated that the main reason for making music materials compulsory is to increase the influence of the library users. The study of the debate concerning the new library act showed that a majority of the Danish political parties as well as the Danish library organizations had a positive attitude towards the new obligation.

The purpose of this study is to look into what part libraries take in the integration of mentally disabled persons into the society. What I wanted to know more about was how the mentally disabled persons experience the library. I also wanted to find out what librarians and persons working with mentally disabled persons have to say about the part libraries take in the integration of mentally disabled into the society. The study is based on interviews and literature studies. I have interviewed two librarians, four mentally disabled persons and two persons working with mentally disabled people.

The aim of this Master thesis is to study the public libraries' function as a place for people to meet. Four major questions are taken up: + Do the public libraries have the function of a meeting place? + How important do the librarians and the visitors find the libraries possible function as a meeting place? Do they think that this function is important? + What differs the public libraries from other places in society when it comes to the function of a meeting place? + What differences are there between a larger and a smaller library when it comes to the function of a meeting place ? The basis of this study are interviews with employees at a province library in Jönköping and at a smaller library in Sjöbo in Borås municipality. Our study deals with the history of public libraries, its functions as a meeting place, its architecture, culture, and statistics concerning numbers of visitors and loans of books. The conclusions that are drawn are that the public libraries have qualifications to function as a meeting place even if that isn't always the case.

In the wake of the electronic revolution digital library has become one of the central themes concerning libraries. The present study takes up the question whether digital library can function in the same way as the conventional library. The question can obviously be posed from different perspectives, e.g. technological-, the user-, or the organizational perspective. The study investigates if (and how) digital library can have the same functions as the traditional library.

The aim of this master thesis is to study if the websites of the Swedish public libraries are accessible to all people. According to the library law all people must have access to the public libraries and their information services. Today, when the Internet is one of the largest sources of information, it is important that all people, including those with different kind of disabilities, children, elderly, immigrants and people with old technical equipment, have access to the public libraries websites.We have in this study considered the graphic user interface, the language, the structure and the navigation possibilities at ten public library websites. We have from a checklist of our own, based upon the opinion of different experts such as Jacob Nielsen and Tommy Sundström, investigated the websites.The main finding of our study is that the websites are generally accessible even thou we found a lack of accessible for immigrants. Most of the websites had some pages in English, but none hade all pages in this language.

The aim of this study is to explore if and how library managers market their competence in communication with local politicians. It is also our aim to find a definition of the competence of librarians. The report identifies and describes problems and possibilitieswith marketing of competence to politicians on the basis of one Swedish municipality's library managers. In order to fulfil this aim we have used a literature study on marketing, competence, the political process and the librarian profession. We have alsocarried out an empirical study where we interviewed ten library managers in onemunicipality, seven politicians in the same municipality and ten representatives for central professional organisations mainly in Sweden.The results are that most library managers don't market their competence because they don?t believe in marketing competence.

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.

The purpose of this master's thesis is to describe and analyse the origin and development of the libraries in the town of Värnamo, between the years 1908 and 1960, when a new modern public library was inaugurated. The method I have used is, to a great extent, examining and analysing source material from the archive of the municipality in Värnamo and the popular movement in Jönköping. As a background to my study I describe the development of the Swedish society, from the end of the nineteenth-, until the middle of the twentieth century. I also describe the local development of Värnamo, during the same period. Furthermore I also give a general description of the progress of the libraries in Sweden during the same time.

In 1995, the World Trade Organization WTO was established. Today WTO has nearly 150 member countries, accounting for over 97 percent of the world trade. WTO has a number of agreements and one of them is the General Agreement on Trade in Services GATS. GATS control the service sector, and the public library is a small part of this sector. The purpose of this study is to examine the Swedish debate about GATSs possibility to affect the public library.

This thesis is about language planning in Faeroese libraries as seen from the countrys specific situation, with Faeroese as a mothers tongue, but with great dominance of the Danish language within media. The purpose of my thesis is to examine language planning activities within the library, and the consequences this planning has for the system. Different theories about language planning provides a framework for my model of the library as a linguistic eco-system with actors performing status planning, represented by the government with its influence in cultural politics, the librarian with his or her library tasks and the user with his or her needs. The thesis has a qualitative attempt, and the empirical material consists of different documents about the country and materials from interviews made with seven qualified librarians, employed within general libraries in the Faeroe Islands. The analysis shows that the librarian in different ways promotes the Faeroese language within library activities, and because of the attention paid to the user in the public library he/she influences the librarians planning.

This is a study about the communication interaction in the context of the reference work at some public university-libraries and some private company libraries in Gothenburg and Borås. The primary purpose of the study is to investigate the communication interaction in a library situation. The second purpose is to deepen the knowledge, understanding and to establish what is important in this communication. Focus has been on how the intermediaries communicate and how she or he perceives this communication. The intermediary needs to manage the communication with all the different patrons and different information needs of the patrons.

This paper aims to map and contrast the research front and theresearch base of Library and Information Science (LIS) inScandinavia during 1980-1989 and 2003-2013 from articlespublished in Web of Science.The research questions are:1. How is the research base and research front in LIS inScandinavia between 1980-1989 and 2003-2012 structured?2. What differences can be observed between the two time periods1980-1989 and 2003-2012 with regards to the research base?3.

The primary aim of this essay is to analyse, contextualise and problematise the scientific and technological goals of android science. The starting point of this investigation is the history of automata and man?s attempts to recreate himself by technological means. Drawing on the no-tion of boundary work this essay also analyses the efforts of the proponents of android science to establish and demarcate a new interdisciplinary field. A secondary aim of the essay is to evaluate the scientific support for the uncanny valley hypothesis and to investigate how this hypothesis contributes to android science.

The scope of this master´s thesis is the issue of usability in relation to interface design,in particular the interface of a university library´s online public accessed catalogue, orOPAC. Since the OPAC can be seen as the library´s ?shop window? to the world, it isof great importance that the interface to the OPAC can be used by patrons witheffectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction.The master´s thesis is based on a qualitative study performed at Karolinska InstitutetsUniversity library, and contains both a usability evaluation and an interview study. Twointerfaces were evaluated: a standard web interface provided by the system supplier, andan interface developed in-house by Karolinska Institutet´s systems department. The twointerfaces are both connected to the same online library catalogue, thus making possiblea comparative study..

The aim with this Master's thesis is to study the debate that takes place in the local community when a public library branch is threatened by closedown through the local newspapers. Through this it is our aim to understand why the debate takes place, and why so many people gets concerned with it. By relating this debate to contemporary research of library- and information science, and the discussion in three major Swedish library journals, we have found the answers to these questions. By studying the debate, we found six subjects that where essential for this study. These were Politics and economics, Urban and rural districts, Democracy and accessibility, The service of the library, The meeting place and To replace a closed down library.