?Facebook has become as natural as having a phone? The use of social media in three libraries in the Umeå region ? an evaluationSocial media has come to be an integral part of people?s everyday life, as well as the business world in terms of communication and marketing. More and more libraries also embark in the use of social media, and the purpose of this study is to evaluate the use of social media in three libraries in the Umeå region. The libraries all use Facebook as their current, primary social media. Thus this study focuses partly on the analysis of the content on each library?s Facebook page, and partly on the experiences of the responsible librarians. The evaluation is based on a mix of existing tools in evaluating social media that are relevant in a library context.

The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate two pearl growing methods in ISI Web of Science. The methods tested are Find Related Records FRR, an automatic service that uses bibliographic coupling, and Author Keywords AK, where searches are performed using the two first keywords from this field. Both search methods were used on twenty initial documents and the first twenty hits were evaluated for relevance using a binary scale 0,1. The relevance criteria were based on specific information needs connected to every initial document. The measures used to evaluate the effectiveness of the search methods were Precision at DCV=10, P10, and Uninterpolated Average Precision AP.

The purpose of this thesis is to describe and analyse the development of the public library in the district of Österåker during a period of 1958-1983. The main goals have been to identify the crucial events in the history of the library within their historical context and to analyse the factors that have been important for the development: financing, location, staffing, stock of books, book-lending level and different activities for children, youngsters and adults. The consideration has been taken to reasons and consequences of these events. The hermeneutic interpretation model of interaction between parts and wholes, between reasons and results is the basic method in this research which leans mainly upon local archives in Österåker. The public library in Österåker was established in 1952 as a fusion of previously existing small libraries: the parish library in Östra Ryd, the Labour Movement?s library and the temperance movement?s library.

This is a two years master?s thesis in Archive, Library and Museum studies, which purpose is to find out what ideas there are about school libraries and to get an idea of how informants interpret the new Education Act, which requires all students to have access to school libraries. Another intention of this paper is to highlight the potential rural-related attitudes of the responents. The study includes the sparsely populated municipality of Krokom and is based on interviews with librarians, the school director, principals and politicians who work there. The theoretical basis for this paper is Loertscher?s model för school libraries and a centerperiphery perspective.

In the digital era, new services have entered the public libraries, like seeking information on the Internet, in databases, newspapers online etc. But many citizens do not know that these services exist. The libraries have a democratic responsibility to inform about them. In the county of Östergötland a project started in 2001 where libraries in five small municipalities built websites in which they present all their electronic services available. One of the aims was with the help of different kinds of marketing to reach special groups of people, like adult students, small companies and politicians.

This essay is about reading among patients in hospital. The aim of the essay is to find out what part reading and the library play for patients in hospital. An additional aim is to find out in what ways the collaboration between hospital librarians and hospital staff could be developed. The starting-point of the problem is one main question: What part does reading play for the patient during the stay at the hospital? On the basis of the answers to this question I have also looked for possibilities of enhanced co-operation between hospital libraries and hospital staff.The method for the essay is qualitative and fifteen persons in three different wards at University Hospital in Malm have been interviewed.

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.