This essay is a study that takes interest in technical and technological change essential to philosophy of science. What is shown is the importance of an active attitude towards this change, by the articulation of the question: Does technical development lead to new ontological questions for science? - and by the answer that such questions do appear.It is clear that passive assumptions in this matter might prohibit science in the proceeding search for truth.By examples of ways in which technical development helps and challenges science, it is concluded that scrutiny of the relationship between technical development and ontological suppositions and hypotheses within science is well motivated..

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the view on the personal encounter between staff and visitors in public libraries in order to detect possible differences between the two groups in order to see if the personal encounter as such could be used in order to market libraries. We believe that social competence must interact with the initial personal encounter in order for the visitor to experience the visit as positive. We have based the theoretical framework on Erving Goffman?s theory on social interaction, as well as on Christian Grönroos? theory on quality of service and marketing. We use the following questions: How do library staff view the personal encounter? How do library visitors view the personal encounter? How does the library staff?s treatment affect the visitor?s view of the library?Are there any differences in view between visitors and staff concerning the personal encounter? If so, what kind of differences are they? Using qualitative interviews, we have interviewed nine visitors and six staff members at two public libraries.

The aim of this two years master?s thesis in library and information science is to study how children and librarians recommend books through the website Barnens bibliotek. In the scope of this aim it also tries to answer the following questions: What qualities in books do children and librarians respectively emphasize when they write book recommendations? How do they formulate the recommendations? And finally, how do their respective recommendations differ?To examine these aspects a total of 50 book recommendations were chosen and analysed through an hermeneutic approach. Out of these 50, 30 were written by children and 20 were written by librarians.

In this Bachelor thesis, we examine how the work of the librarian has changed over the past three decades. The research questions focus on the changes in librarians´ roles and working tasks regarding factors like technique, meetings between librarians and visitors and also how to give service to visitors.We have conducted interviews with librarians at university libraries as well as public libraries. In all, there were four interviews. We have also compared the two types of libraries.We have looked closely at these factors: the tasks of the librarians, the skills needed, how the library has been used as a democratic arena, and what kinds of meetings there are among librarians and users of the library. From these themes we have created interview questions, and our analysis is structured according to the themes.We have worked from a theory on different kinds of identities within the profession.

This thesis aims at exploring a national collaborative gateway-service, PictureAustralia, hosted at the National Library of Australia. This will be done by means of investigating some underlying principles for descriptive standards and conventions as of the library discourse which is the objective of bibliographic control and access. The reason to do this is to bring some main features of these principles into the context of a cross-institutional cooperation between libraries, galleries/museums and archives in a picture database service. The attention will lay on the objectives of what functions the system is designed to perform to give access, as defined by Elaine Svenonius in the Intellectual Foundations of Information Organization 2000, and how these objectives will affect this particular database-service collocating performance, which is a system- and logical approach. Though, this study will be done in an explorative and qualitative way, by a case-study, which is to examine some sample metadata records emanated from different institutions in this project.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to investigate how actors involved in a municipal's adult education view students access to information- and library resources. The adult education in the municipal is on contract which means that there are several different actors involved in the realization of the adult education. The raised questions in this study deals with; libraries role within adult education, students needs for becoming information literate and where responsibilities for students access to libraries lies. We used a qualitative method which includes interviews with two principles, a controller, three pedagogues and a librarian. The empirical data is analysed against taxonomies and categories which originates from the theories of David Loertscher and Christine Bruce.

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.

Chunks and Tasks is a programming model based on the C ++ programming language. This programming model is used for electronic structure calculations, among other things.The purpose of this project is to improve the CHT-MPI software library for Chunks and tasks, so that calculations of matrix-matrix multiplications are performed more efficiently than they do with the existing software library. The software library is based on the work stealing method, which is a method the software library for Chunks and Tasks uses for the distribution of the calculation work. The considered way to improve the software library is by modifying the work stealing method in a way that makes the distribution of calculation work happen in a more efficient way , which will lead to calculations performed faster than before.Two different modifications of the work stealing method were tested and it led to two new methods, Method 1 and Method 2, which distributed the calculation work differently. Method 1 did not give results that were compatible with the theory, since the calculation time with this method was much longer than the previous method.

The aim of this thesis was twofold, on the one hand to compile a set of usability and accessibility guidelines in order to establish the characteristics of a user friendly website, and on the other to test these guidelines on eight library webcourses with user education to see how well they adhered to the guidelines. The methods used were literature survey and source studies. The guidelines found in the literature survey were divided into four different categories: document properties, structure and navigability, visual characteristics and accessibility. In order to establish the adequacy of the guidelines, I examined reference sources, mostly on the web. To a certain extent this examination has been based on HCI Human-Computer interaction theories.

Earth science is a dynamic system science that explores the structures and processes of the earth. Knowledge about the earth is important for citizens since the science is a vital part in the sustainable development of the society. Without good basic knowledge the citizens don?t have the possibility to anticipate in the questions and decision-making that concerns e.g. anthropogenic climate change. In the Swedish school system earth science is not an independent subject until academically studies at the University?s.

The municipality of Falkenberg is a result of a unification of several smaller municipalities in 1971, each one with a small library. This left Falkenberg with an unusual large amount of smaller branch libraries. The object of this thesis is to describe and try to understand the political conflicts that have erupted during the period 1971-1994. Through a case study containing press clippings from the local newspaper, different reports, political meeting protocols, a historical background of the library and a study of library specific norms and regulations I can create an image of the heated debate. The participants in this debate can be divided into politicians and civil servants and the conflict circles round the fact that from an economical perspective, there is not enough budget to keep all the small, local libraries.

Weblogs, or blogs, are frequently modified web pages with a series of archived entries, generally in reverse chronological sequence. This thesis focuses on the rapid-growing phenomenon of weblogs and the fact that individuals with a background in library and information science are frequent users of weblogs. Since this is an explorative inductive study the ultimate purpose can be described as to find out what ?blogging? as activity is about. The research questions posed are: Why do individuals with a background in library and information science use weblogs? How does their professional identity affect their blogging? And finally; how do they use the weblog to create networks with other bloggers? The empirical material consists of audiotaped interviews with five informants who are all employed in knowledge work, either as librarians or information specialists.

The aim of this essay is to investigate how patrons, librarians and indexers use subject headings to describe and index fiction literature. We wanted to know if the groups concentrated on different levels in the text from a semiotic viewpoint, where words either can describe the manifest/connotative meaning or the latent/denotative. To investigate this we had four fiction indexers, four librarians working with fiction for adults and eight library users read and index four short stories. After that we did interviews asking them about how they were thinking when describing the texts, how they use subject headings, about their opinions on indexing and, in the interviews with the librarians and indexers, about their usual work assignments. The subject headings they listed were analysed according to the level they described.

In this study our aim is to display a series of possible mechanisms which operateswithin the regions and societies were child soldiers were frequently andextensively used in combat tasks. Our study is based on the assumption thattoday's peace-building strategies are inadequate to describe certain problemsfaced by many post-conflict countries, especially in Africa. We argue that largeformations of child soldiers will, if not properly and immediately addressed, causeserve and structural problems in society, gravely hampering growth andinstitutional capacity. The Issues of Post Traumatic Stress and societal insecuritybrought on by the use of child soldiers poses a serious threat to society as a whole.In this study we use Uganda as an illustrative case to describe the mechanisms atwork..

"What's feminine about the Women's library?" This library, Kvinnobiblioteket, is abranchoffice at Björkskatan in the city of Luleå, and the introducing question is thestartingpoint of this essay. To find some possible answers is its object.One way of describing what's feminine about Kvinnobiblioteket is through presenting itsobjective, ambitions and methods of working. That is done mostly in a chapter headlined"Kvinnobiblioteket", and shows how the women's perspective concerns for exarnplepurchase of books and magazines, displaying of books, the opening hours, design etc.Although the focus in the survey is not in the former kind of description, but in the interviewsbeing made during a two week long period of time with ten women at Kvinnobiblioteket(both library user and personnel) at spring 1995. The results of the interviewsthen have been compared with theories from psychological-, feminist-, literature- andlibrary and information sciences, as we11 as to former surveys and essays.The material together leads to some keywords that seem to be important when trying tofind out what's female about the women's library.