This thesis is about how the library can help immigrants integrate into theswedish society. By studying leading documents of the libraries in Malmö,Stockholm and Umeå in search for how the relate to work consideringimmigrants and integration I have studied the library as a bridge betweenbeing included and excluded in the society. The thought is that the libraryopens the door to new worlds both for immigrants and born swedes toobtain knowledge about a culture different from their own.In my thesis I reached the conclusion that library on a day to day basisworks with the integrationprocess for immigrants. Although the leadingdocuments should evolve since they show gaps and seem somewhatmisguiding in their presentation of the libraries function. The librariesshould work more with analysis of the environment that they are active in sothat they are more individualized for the people around it.

This dissertation discusses head librarians in Swedish public libraries and the stress factors which affect them. The aim is to map out potential stress factors which head librarians come across in their day-to-day work. The purpose of the dissertation is to answer the following question: what stress factors affect library managers in Swedish public libraries? The dissertation was conducted through a literature study, informal interviews and a quantitative questionnaire. The results of the quantitative questionnaires show that the factor that produces the highest level of stress is having too many different tasks.

The explosion of new digital media puts pressure for developments within copyright law both in Sweden and internationally. These developments are taking place on two different international areas: (1) WIPO which is a part of the UN family and (2) the EU where a new directive on copyright law is being prepared and probably implemented during 2001. The aim of this thesis is twofold: (1) to study which considerations libraries must make when handling the new digital media both under today's copyright laws and under those which are being developed internationally. (2) What will be the consequences, for Swedish libraries, if the new EU-directive on copyright law is implemented in Sweden? By analysing current copyright laws, international treaties and the proposal for a new EU-directive as well as the national debate the thesis brings attention to a number of central issues for libraries.

This two years master?s thesis is about book circles for children, arranged by the public libraries in Sweden. The purpose is to gain knowledge about how children experience their participation in book circles, and how they experience their own reading. It focuses on children aged 10 to 12 years, and their leisure reading. The research questions are: What are the book circles? function for the participants? How and why do the children read? What kind of literature do they like? Do the children experience that their reading has developed through their participation in the book circles? What parts of the reading process do the book circles influence?The theoretical framework is threefold.

Abstract"The war on terror" has resulted in numerous exceptions from the constitutional order. This thesis is an attempt to give empirical support to Georgio Agambens theory that these exceptions should be regarded as a constant element in modern societies based on a constitutional order. The results of the case study of the empirical exceptions in the American context give Agambens theory validity. The exception is a reappearing phenomenon, which implies that the constitutional order is fragile. What then is it that makes the legal norms fragile? In this thesis I will discuss the causality of moral panic.

The purpose of this master thesis is to investigate the differences between the traditional way of conducting a reference interview and the electronic way. The main questions of this thesis are: How does the electronic reference interview appear in comparison to the traditional one? How do the librarians experience the differences? Is quality affected in the electronic reference interview? Examples from Fråga biblioteket Ask the Library have been used in this study. The method used in the investigation is based on qualitative interviews in combination with studies of relevant and recent literature. The librarians interviewed all have experience from both traditional and electronic reference work.

This case study is an attempt to give empirical support to Georgio Agambens theory, regarding how the exceptions from the constitutional order should be regarded as a constant element in modern societies. The purpose was to investigate if Agambens theory is valid in the Swedish context. The exception, as definied by Agamben, is a reappearing phenomenon, which implies that the constitutional order is fragile. Individuals and groups are transferred into ?homo sacers?, meaning people that is to be regarded as legally naked, and offset from the rest of society.What then is it that make the legal norms fragile? In this thesis I will discuss the causality of moral panic.

The purpose of this thesis is to research public librarians view ofthe public library as a meeting place and how it may contribute tofacilitate social integration. To study this we have asked thefollowing research questions: How do public librarians work withthe public library as a meeting place? And how do they contributeconditions for ?soft inclusion??The method we have used for this study is semi-structuredinterviews. Seven public librarians from the Gothenburg areawere interviewed and the empirical material was analyzed usingqualitative content analysis.As a theoretical foundation we have used Dorte Skot-Hansensmodel of the public library as a third place and Mikael Stigendalstheory on social inclusion. Furthermore have we used research onthe public library as a meeting place and social integration as acomplement to the model and the theory.Conclusions from the material gathered is that public librarianssee the public library as a meeting place with potential tocontribute to integrating individuals and groups with one another.The librarians? foremost method was to attract visitors withactivities aimed at certain target groups.

In this master thesis I investigate different views on literary quality in two quite different library journals; Biblioteksbladet and Bibliotek i Samhälle. One aim of the study is to see whether the ambiguity of the term literary quality is considered. Since there is no universally accepted definition of literary quality to be found the analysis is inspired by discourse analysis. This theoretical frame work starts off in the assumption that our views of the world are much dependent the way we describe it. The work of Finnish scholar Sanna Talja is presented and the results of this thesis are compared with the three perspectives on music culture that are presented in her book.

The purpose of this thesis is to determine how well a student is prepared as a future librarian at BHS in Borås, when it comes to serving individuals with hearing disabilities at the libraries. The theory and combined methods is that of discourse theory, interviews and Webb searches. The source material for this thesis comprises course material from 2002 and 2003, with the main focus on the spring term 2003 and on what is called the users perspective användarperspektivet. The study is divided into two parts: firstly, to determine the students expected knowledge and his/her future professional identity through this knowledge. The user groups that were mentioned to the students during the education were also linked to the students knowledge.

The aim of our study is to gain understanding of how parentsperceive their own, the preschool's, and the library's efforts to stimulate preschoolers' enjoyment and yearning to read, as well as what types of collaborative efforts the parents seek.The study is based upon qualitative interviews with parents, both mothers and fathers, to preschool children (aged 1.5 to 6 years old). The analysis does not offer any generalizations. We have chosen to use a sociocultural perspective as the theoretical starting-point of our study, our thoughts being that we learn together with and by the help of others. We consider this perspective to be closely related to Aidan Chambers's "The Reading Circle", which we have chosen to use as our tool of analysis.It turned out that the parents perceived their own reading stimulating role as crucial, even if they did not consider all they did as reading stimulative. Some things, such as discussing the book while reading, occurred naturally but is also an important part to stimulate reading.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the performance of queries that are expanded by 1 inflections, 2 compound splitting and 3 inflections and compound splitting combined. For compound splitting, the morphological analyser SWETWOL was used. Queries were executed in the Query Performance Analyser, QPA, containing the InQuery system. Query terms were selected from 29 topics, all of whom containing at least one compound word. Both the queries and the documents were in Swedish.

This master's thesis studies Utländska biblioteket, a 19th century foreign literature subscription library in Karlskrona, Sweden. The aim of the thesis is to investigate Utländska biblioteket between 1835?1864.The material consists primarily of primary sources from the archive of Utländska biblioteket. The main primary sources are the library's accounts book, its minutes, and two book catalogs. Using analytical tools from Jürgen Habermas, feminist criticism of his ideas and from Pierre Bourdieu, as well as results from previous research on older library forms and female organization in the 19th century, the thesis answers questions relating to the library as a society, its members and its book collection.The investigation shows that Utländska biblioteket was a subscription library as well as a book circle.

We studied how librarians would adapt to telework, the performance of job responsibilitiesfrom home. We found'that all duties could be accomplished. but to varied extents.Computerbased searches, interlibrary loans, acquisitions, indexing and telephone referenceservices are the duties most likely to adapt to telework whereas cataloguing andclassification probably are best performed in the ordinary workplace.Most duties would demand access to technical means of assistance when performed fromhome. Connections to the library's local network, directly or via modem, are requiredbecause it is unrealistic to expect librarians to telework with fewer tools than theyordinarily have available. Although librarians generally believe that teleworking will nothave a large irnpact on the operation of the library, most would like to telework.Whether teleworking is a viable strategy depends on the characteristics of the duties, thelibrarian's desire to telework, but also on the size of the library, the size of its staff, thelibrary's activities, and how work is distributed between librarians..

Since a decade back in time, Sweden is officially recognised as a multicultural society. Different cultures exist side by side and the city of Malmo is one of the clearest examples of this setting. In multicultural societies, the dichotomy of ?us? versus ?them? is common, which leads to segregation and asymmetrical relations of power. The concept of intercultural education is in theory known to be able to create a position of ?us? where every culture is equally recognized and reinterpreted and thus become an alternative to the dichotomy.