The purpose of the master thesis was to reflect and analyze music library activities and policies in the public libraries in the area around the city of Borås, in the south-western part of Sweden. With this thesis I also wanted to look at the interaction between the public libraries, the music school and the music associations in the same area. To investigate these matters, qualitative method was used in the form of interviews with seven librarians from seven different libraries and five representatives of different local music organizations. Other methods used were observations and source studies. The literature used discusses the role of the music department of public libraries as well as that of a music librarian working in a public library.

This Master thesis aims to study the relation between Swedish governmental cultural policy and cultural events at two Swedish public libraries. The Masters thesis demonstrates how national cultural policy regulates every part of the public library. This demonstration is a result based upon national cultural policy documents and interviews with employees at two public libraries in Sweden. The conclusion that national cultural policy regulates this part of the public library is drawn with help of the circle of culture as applied in Culture Studies and Michel Foucault theories of power. The thesis contains the answer of four questions, two involving cultural policy and the other two events at the library.

The aim of this thesis is to define digital library, and to investigate a relation between the construction of a digital library and user needs. The main questions to be answered are: 1 What criteria was used when constructing a digital library, particularly concerning issues like purpose, function, design, supply, services, resources and future development of the digital library? 2 How do the digital library system designers and system builders criteria correspond with those of postgraduate researchers? And what factors affect the use? A digital library is an enterprise that gives access to information stored digitally and directly available on the net. The crucial is that the enterprise has a control over collection of information and responsibility to make it available to a defined group of users. In order to investigate the relation between the construction of the digital library and user needs, I have interviewed five key people involved with the work with the digital library and twenty postgraduate researchers from the Gothenburg University.

The aim of this study was to map the intellectual base at the Swedish School of Library and Information Science (SSLIS) at the University Collage of Borås, and to compare this intellectual base to the intellectual base of the research area Library and Information Science. This was done by analysing the citations in publications published, between the year of 2001 to the first quarter of 2006, by researchers at the institution, using the technique of author cocitation analysis. Cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling, statistical techniques that are traditional i the author cocitation analysis, formed an objective map of the intellectual base at the SSLIS. This map was then compared with three prior studies, that used the same technique to map the intellectual base of the research area. The result shows that the map of the intellectual base at the SSLIS consists of the specialities: user studies, library studies, culture/cultural policy, information retrieval, bibliometrics and information in organisations.

In the library community there is a continuous discussion about enhancing user interactivity on library websites, according to the principles of Web 2.0, called Library 2.0. The purpose of this thesis is to study how librarians conceive Library 2.0. The focus is on the study of the librarians? conceptions of user interactivity on the website, and if the librarians conceive that their professional role is affected by Library 2.0. The study is implemented methodologically by interviewing six librarians and using phenomenography as an approach.

The purpose of this master?s thesis is to investigate the culture for children in the age of 10-12 year-old at the library in a small town and to see if the library and children shared the same view of the libraries missions. We have interviewed 3 groups of 5-7 children at two times. We have also interviewed a children librarian about her opinion of her work and childrenculture. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child works as our theory in this thesis.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine the importance of public libraries for individuals in their everyday life and to study the differences in views between the individuals. Questions posed in this study are: What do public libraries mean to individuals? Which differences between individuals views of the public library are to be found? What is the reason for differences to occur? The analysis is based upon qualitative interviews with six persons, four women and two men between 31 and 55 years of age. The theoretical starting points are Anderson and Skot-Hansens theory of four different roles of public libraries and Bourdieus theory of lifestyle. The study acts on a hermeneutic attitude.

This thesis examines information seeking and information needs at the Swedish Government Offices. The Government Offices comprise the Prime Ministers Office, the Government Ministries and the Office for Administrative Affairs. Approximately 4 500 members of staff are employed, of whom around 120 are political appointees. For this study, interviews have been conducted with 15 senior officials and political appointees at the Government Ministries and the Prime Ministers Office. The interviews have been supplemented with literature studies based on user studies research in library and information science.

This masters thesis aims at a discussion about whether the public library will be an educating and cultivating society institution in the future. The method used is a combination of interviews with library staff in leading position and studies of the public librarys relationship to cultivation and adult education in a changeable society. The work concentrates on two main questions. One is about what, and in which way, changes, that are important for the public library and that take place in society now or within the next ten years, affect the future activities of the library. The other is about the public librarys relationship to cultivation in general and in the future.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine the library discourses concerning the phenomenon and concept of digital libraries in Swedish library press 1980-2002. What changes can be identified? The questions are: what is said about the conditions for the phenomenon; how is the concept of digital libraries used; who makes these statements; what are the relations between these discussions and the library context in which they are made? Five Swedish library journals, BBL/Biblioteksbladet, DIK-forum, Human IT, Svensk biblioteksforskning and Tidskrift för dokumentation, were examined. The method used was discourse analysis. The theoretical starting-point was Foucaults discourse theory.

This Master s thesis deals with the display of library media, whether it is conceivable and desirable to draw inspiration from the retail business when displaying articles. The questions asked are: are there, in the retail sector, well established display ideas and - if so - what do they look like? Are the similarities in conditions, between the branches, sufficient? In conveying the ideas to libraries, are the potential differences not obstructive? Is there, among librarians, a positive attitude towards further development of library display techniques? The results were achieved by interviewing shop window dressers and librarians. In addition, a survey was sent to the library managers of 65 public libraries in southern Sweden. The results show that there are established ideas and methods of displaying materials, and that the ideas are manifested in frequently used techniques.

This thesis examines the perception and use of the school library for students at an Upper Secondary School. The school has a high frequent of immigrant students, and the students interviewed all have an immigrant background. The intention was to find out how the students used the school library and what perception they have of the school library. The method used was semi-structured interviews with eight students, both males and females, who studies different educational programs. The instrument of theory was that from Elisabeth Tallaksen Rafste?s theoretical framework.

The aim of this thesis is to mediate to the reader an image of Chinese classification systems and in what way the methods of classification have progressed during time. The tradition of classification in China is very old and dates back more than two thousand years, but it wasnt until the downfall of the dynastic era in the beginning of the 20th century, that Chinese libraries and methods of classification were modernized. This thesis also identifies the development of Chinese librarianship which is of old age since Chinese literature stretches three thousand years back. The main question is in what way the values of three different philosophies are reflected in five classification systems compiled between 1953-1975. The three philosophies are Daoism, Confucianism and Maoism/Mao Zedong Thought.

This essay is about leadership in libraries within the academic world, i.e. leadership in research libraries. To place our survey in a context we begin the theoretical review with a chapter about organisation theory. We dont think its possible to separate the leader from the organisation so we wanted to describe the organisation and its effect on the leadership. The next theoretical section is about leadership research.

The question whether controlled vocabulary or natural language free-text terms is the most effective search strategy has occupied researchers in LIS for many decades. This Masters thesis is an empirical study which aims to compare these two search strategies in LISA Library and Information Science Abstracts, an online bibliographic database. 22 topics from the discipline of Library and Information Science were constructed and out of each topic one query for each search strategy was formed. Queries in natural language were formed with terms from different sources, for example dictionaries, while queries in controlled vocabulary were built with terms from LISAs electronic thesaurus. The measures used in this study were precision, relative recall pooling method and overlap.