This master thesis deals with reading and library habits among young male students at the vehicle engineering programme in an upper secondary school. Also their overall opinion of libraries has been looked into. For the completion of this study all of the 43 students in question took part in a questionnaire while 5 of them were interviewed. The result of this statistical survey complemented with more focused interviews show that at some time or another all the students read, but their preference lies within the news and engineering pages of daily newspapers and periodicals. Those who read books choose action and fantasy for content.

This masters thesis shows that the changes in the scientific publishing system have affected the academic libraries. Both technological change and the increased prices on scientific journals have forced academic libraries to take action. Some Swedish academic libraries have started publishing the university s own research material. The issue has in many cases been treated more as a library concern, than as a concern for the university as a whole. Neither has there been a national coordination of these matters in Sweden.

The aim of this master's thesis is a comparative study on units for civic information in Göteborg. The study is based on a project currently in progress at the main public library in Göteborg. It is observed that according to the library's mission statement the library aims to become the most competent intermediary of civic information in Göteborg. This statement suggests a competitive strategy towards other intermediaries of civic information. The mission statement does, however, also state that their goal is to be obtained in cooperation with other intermediaries.

Detta kandidatarbete undersöker science fiction, en av de större och vanligast använda genrerna inom medier såsom spel, film och litteratur, genom att studera dess undergrupper, de så kallade subgenrerna. Dessa är specialiserade versioner av genren i fråga och använder den inom vissa förutsatta ramar, exempelvis hur samhället ser ut eller vilken typ av teknologi det huvudsakliga fokuset kretsar runt. Genom att studera hur subgenrer är beskrivna i The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction kan man avgöra att de består av sex punkter: plats, tidsperiod, karaktärer, teknologi, narrativ och visuell estetik. Dessa punkter har använts som ramverk för att utveckla en ny subgenre; Mystech, där scenarier utspelar sig i vad som kan ses som en typisk fantasyvärld med magi och monster, men där dessa egentligen bara är teknologi majoriteten av de påverkade inte förstår sig på. För att demonstrera Mystech har två olika miljöer utvecklats, både i bild och skriven form.

The aim of this thesis is to, from a feminist point of view, analyse the Universal Decimal Classification UDC, which is an international and widely used classification system. A number of the larger classification systems and subject heading lists have during the last decades been placed in the limelight of various gender studies and the systems treatment of women has been criticized. With this examination of the UDC, I dont merely wish to identify shortcomings and advantages with the UDCs way to treat men and women. The UDC is also used as an example of how the gender problem can be identified and interpretated in classification systems generally. My analysis is performed with a theoretical foundation in feminist science theories about knowledge and norms, together with a linguistic perspective on valuing and emotionally tinged language.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to study how librarians experience reference work. We wanted to get a better understanding about librarians assignments through the study. We chose to limit the study to public libraries, and to the south of Sweden. The questions used in our study are: How do librarians interpret the conception of reference work? What values do librarians have concerning reference work? How do librarians experience reference work? How do librarians look at different roles in reference work? We chose to use a fenomenographically inspired method.

The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to examine what role the new city library in Halmstad has for its users. The questions posed in this study are: What do the users actually do at the library? What roles are the most significant according to the users? Have the politicians succeeded in their intention of realizing a modern library according to the users? The theoretical starting point is Andersson?s and Skot-Hansen?s theory of four different roles of public libraries. In order to extend the model we added a fifth function; the one of aesthetical experience.

Facilitated by the breakthrough of the internet, new ways of organizing internet-based projects that harness the power of the crowds are becoming increasingly common. Today there are ways of using the crowd as paid labour, as funders of your new project ventures and even for helping scientists doing science. Staying true to its traditional principles of objectivity and trustworthiness while asking the crowd to contribute, crowd generated ?Citizen Science? does not provide even the slightest amount of pay in exchange for the time and effort put in by their contributors. Surely there can not be many people willing to do such a thing voluntarily? Actually, practice is showing the exact opposite with contributions counted in their millions among the more popular Citizen Science projects.

This thesis examines how library employees experience the library as a meeting place. Our questions are: What effect has the concept of a "library as a meeting-place" for library staff?How do they see the library as a meeting place? How do they see their workplace as a venue for meetings? The respondents interviewed work in public libraries. We were inspired by a cultural geographic theory that we re-designed. The following divisions were made in order to give the work a definitive structure:The "mental space"The library as a meeting place on a global and universal level;The "conceived space"Librarians and planners' thinking on the specific library as a meeting place;The "living space"How library staff perceive that the library is used as a meeting place in reality.In our analysis, we use a phenomenographic qualitative interpretive methodology.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine which factors influence librarians selection of electronic information sources, and to investigate whether librarians use of search strategies and search tactics changes depending on which information source they use. The electronic information sources are: online databases, Online Public Access Catalogues OPAC, World Wide Web, and CD-ROM databases. The theoretical framework is based on step 3 Select a source and step 4 Formulate a Query in Marchioninis information seeking model. The search strategies are divided into two categories: analytical and browsing strategies. In order to supplement the theoretical framework with empirical facts, 8 librarians were interviewed.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the opportunities of classification of web pages. Two classification systems are compared; a library classification system traditional and a system that is developed for use on the web new. UDC is chosen to represent the traditional systems, and Yahoo! represents a so called new system. UDC is used by NISS Directory of networked resources, which is a directory that uses the system for organisation of electronic resources. Both systems are analysed from two different perspectives, a multidisciplinary and a timeperspective.

The main purpose of this thesis is to examine what problems may arise when converting class symbols from one classification scheme to another. In order to fulfill this purpose, a conversion table between parts of the Swedish online-version of the UDC and the Swedish classification system SAB was constructed. For main classes 0 and 3 every class number from this abridged version of the UDC was converted, whereas for the rest of the main classes only class numbers with fewer than four figures were converted. The conversion table was constructed using the alphabetical index of SAB and different UDC-indexed library catalogues. Various aspects of the conversion table were then analysed using methods mainly devised by the authors themselves, but inspired by lexicography and multilingual thesaurus construction.

With this master thesis I wanted to find out whether Erik Fichtelius, an SVT employee, interview project with prime minister Göran Persson is acceptable according to the public service ideology. In order to do that I used Swedish newspaper articles to analyse the so called Fichtelius affair. I also gathered material on SVT and the public service ideology. The master thesis is based on sociologist Manuel Castells theories on mass media and television as presented in the Information Age. Castells claims that in our time different areas, such as politics and television, are melting together.

Virtual Communities is an increasingly common phenomenon on the Internet. Most of the Virtual Communities are operated and maintained on a non-profit basis with a direction towards entertainment. However, as more state administrated and commercial services become web-based, we believe that the number of Virtual Communities with a community-based or commercial direction will increase in a near future. In this thesis, we describe our participation in, and studies of, a number of Virtual Communities with focus on the IRC-channel ?3dfxsweden?. On the basis of our experiences, we describe the social elements that form the foundation on which the Virtual Community rely on.

The aim of this master thesis is to investigate and illustrate the measures that parents, teachers and school librarians can take in order to influence childrens reading, and, more importantly, how these attempts performed by the adults in the childs environment affect the reading habits of the child. The methods used include qualitative interviews, undertaken with eight students/children, their teacher and a school librarian, and an observation of a book talk in the studied class. Considering that no interviews have been executed with the parents, the results presented regarding the parents prospects of encouraging childrens reading, are therefore to be seen from the perspective of the children, and analysed as such. Three different theories have been employed in order to elucidate the results of the study; Bourdieus theory about the cultural capital transmitted from parent to child; Aidan Chambers theory on the book talk as promoting reading; and Louise Limbergs theory on the levels of the school library and its consequent prognosis of working to promote reading. The results of the study concur with Bourdieus theory, in that the childrens reading habits in most cases seem to have been affected by the amount of involvement that the parents have given to promote their reading.