The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to examine and analyze the discourse concerning a new public library in Stockholm. The paper further discusses how this discourse corresponds with what is written about public libraries in a number of national and international documents. To do this I have utilized the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe. By using some of their instruments I have established the discourse around a number of keywords.

This paper is about employees' opinion towards libraries. The target group consists of employees at industrial research institutes in Sweden. Libraries offer several more services today than they have done before. I think many people do not recognise all of them and I also think the knowledge and the opinion about libraries have to do with use of them. Since I am curious about if this is true or not the purpose of this essay is to find out, through an attitude research, the employees', at industrial research institutes, opinion about library service.

This thesis has been written with the intention of investigating a commercial lending library to be found in Stockholm in the first decades of the nineteenth century. We chose this subject because it is a relatively unexplored area. Furthermore, we were curious to know what books could be found in the library. The lending library was run as a business thus giving a good indication of the contemporary reader's taste in literature. The lending library that we chose had a total of three thousand titles in those of its catalogues that have survived to the present day and was run by a woman called Eva Unander.

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.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the implementation of genres, pertaining to non-fiction, in four different universal classification schemes BC2, UDC, DDC, SAB. It is not the aim of this paper to answer the question why certain genres are more implemented than others, or vice versa. Instead it is intended to be an investigation into the concept of non-fiction genres with the aim of attracting attention to the many interesting aspects of this concept for library- and information science research. An analysis of the schemes general auxiliary tables is performed by comparison with a specific genre-system devised by Ottar Grepstad. This genre-system is organised by dividing different genres into groups according to linguistic criteria.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine the professional discourses that can be identified in the public library field. My main focus is to look at the professional views on the added value of public library. Questions posed in this study are: how does the professional language look when it comes of speaking and reasoning about the public librarys added value and function, which discourses can be identified in the professional language about the public library, what could the discourses entail for the future of public library? The empirical data consist of four interviews where the respondents have been constituted by public librarians.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how young women create their feminine gender positions in relation to their reading. Using qualitative research methods the empirical material has been collected through so called reflexive interviews with eight young women aged 15-17. From their statements the empirical material has been divided into five themes that are important to the young women, as well as to the formulation of the problem. This constitutes the model of analysis. The analysis has been conducted through an examination of these themes from a gender theoretical perspective and through the application of theories about reading and gender.

TitleThe profession of Children's Librarians. Identity and vocation.AbstractThe aim of this Master's thesis is to investigate the professional identity of Children's Librarians in order to contribute to a deeper understanding to the professions of librarians. This places the thesis in the field of Library and Information Science that studies the profession. The definition we use to understand profession suggests that all librarians take an active part in negotiating their professional role and library enterprise.Our empirical material consists of interviews with eight Children's Librarians. Using a qualitative method was the best way to gain an understanding for the participant's own experiences of their professional identity.

This paper is a comparing study of the retrieval effectiveness of the search engines Google, Google Scholar and Scirus. The aim is to find out how good they are at retrieving relevant academic material in the research-field of Library and Information science. The thirty search questions where based on actual information needs collected from exams within the field of Library and Information Science. This method was used to prevent that none of the search engines were given an advantage because of construction of the information needs. The first twenty retrieved documents on the retrieval lists are examined for academic content and relevance.

This master thesis is written in the purpose to discover which attitudes the public libraries in Sweden and Denmark have towards offering popular music to their patrons, how they motivates their choices and why they make the choices they make. The essay focuses on the differences and similarities between the Swedish and Danish libraries and relates their attitudes to the Finnish researcher Sanna Taljas three discourses regarding music policies in libraries.We examined this by sending out a question sheet to public libraries in Sweden and Denmark, the questions were regarding popular music's place in the library and how they build up their music collection. The question sheets were sent out to a total of 116 libraries of which 46 were Danish.The conclusions we drew after our examination were that Danish and Swedish public libraries have a lot in common in the way they regard and distribute popular music in the public libraries. Both of the respondent groups puts user demand high on the priority list as well as having a collection that holds significant works of many genres..

This masters thesis concerns the professional knowledge of the librarian. It is a comparative study where two major ma-gazines in library press, Biblioteksbladet and DIK-forum, is compared between the years 1990-2000, in relation to the theories of professionalization and the associations to the union. The study focus on showing the differences and similarities between the two magazines according to how they interact from the subjects education, wages and status. The study is conducted from two questions: - Which are the central differences and similarities in the description of the librarian profession in the two magazines, from the perspectives of wage, status and education? - In what way do the two magazines reflect the theories of professionalization? To give a wider perspective of the librarian profession, there is also a historical chapter with an explanation to the making of the librarian profession..

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.

This Masters thesis is concerned with the complex planning process of setting up a citizen bureau in a public library. The aim is to find out how citizen bureaux are designed and to suggest a simplified model of strategic planning. The planning process is studied from a business perspective in the library context, and this perspective is also used to study citizen bureaux and their written plans elsewhere. A combination of qualitative methods are used: observations, focus group discussions and interviews. Observations in the public library showed a great need for an environmental analysis as well as structure to the planning process.

In my paper I have compared popular science and neutral science regarding language and construction. My task was to find out if there are differences between the language of popular science and that of scientific science. The purpose of my paper is to answer four questions1.How do the authors present the bogbodies and the mummies in the two categories?2.What does the popular science imagine that you want to read about?3.Is there a difference between the target groups of the two categories?4. Does the presentation of the subject have consequenses when it comes to contents and readers?I have studied how often the authors use drawings, photos, diagrams, maps, and if the titles of the chapters can tell you something about the nature of books.

The aim of this bachelor?s thesis is to investigate what role the public library in Sweden may have when it comes to gender equality issues. The questions at issue that were asked, in order to give an answer to the aim, was how the librarians defined and saw work with equality, how much the steering documents for the library impact and what they are doing in their practice to weaken the dichotomies between the sexes. The theoretical starting point used for this study is three concepts, the gender system, the stereotypes and the gender contract described by the Swedish historian Yvonne Hirdman. The purpose of the three concepts is that gender is a social construction which produces gender stereotypes and a gender order in society, which the library is a part of.