The Swedish government has made the decision to transform the talking book system from an analogue system to a digital system called DAISY by the end of 2004. The purpose of this Masters thesis is to examine how public libraries are affected by this system change. This is carried out by studying the current situation in public libraries concerning the transition to DAISY. This qualitative oriented study is primarily based on interviews with four librarians and three library managers at six public libraries. Management by objectives is here seen as a suitably theoretical framework since public municipal libraries are partly regulated by the governments goals and laws.

The City Library has a problem getting children interested in reading. Futhermore, there are no clear signs to aid children to navigate themselves to books targeted to their age group. To solve this problem, this thesis aims to design signs that is both illustrative and informative.Of the images that were tested during the research, I would assume that children in such a wide age range requires the simplest level of abstraction from testing the three testing icons, since the second level of abstraction was not interesting enough for the kids. The third, nearphotorealistic level was most liked by the children who were in the city library more often and looked for books themselves..

This thesis aims towards an understanding of information systems and subject representation in relation to academic disciplines. This is achieved by comparing how a discipline, History of science and ideas, represents itself compared with the subject representation of its dissertations in an information system, LIBRIS. The point of departure for this thesis is the domain analytic view of Hjorland which states that the quality in information seeking is enhanced if the subject representation considers the contexts in which documents are produced and used. The importance of concepts such as domain and discipline is discussed. The disciplines view of itself is established by the study of articles written by scholars in the discipline, by how the discipline presents itself on the homepages of five university institutions and by the examination of titles and keywords given to dissertations in the discipline.

The general view of learning has dramatically changed during the last two decades. Today we talk about learning for life and educate to meet the demands of the information society. This new view forces us to constantly relearn and develop new knowledge ? something which has resulted in large restructuring within the upper secondary school. New forms of teaching, where the pupils are given the opportunity to a more active search for knowledge, is developing.

The departure point of this thesis is the context of the institution and the processes surrounding the handling of personal archives at the National Library of Sweden. These processes are examined using Actor Network Theory. Around the personal archive a network is constructed and contained by actors ? the archive itself, the librarian, the conservator, the researcher, organizational structures and others. Within this network choices are made of what is significant.

There can be a gap between the author and the reader. This gap is especially remarkable when the author is an adult and the reader is a young person. The librarian has an important role as an intermediary of literature when it comes to selecting literature for young people. From this perspective the purpose of this paper has been to investigate how young people comprehend the problems and the stories of youth novels, first published in 2001, and to investigate to what extent descriptions of problems occur in this literature and what kind of problems that are described. The investigation consists of three parts: an examination of reviews of youth novels written by editors from Bibliotekstjänst and an examination of a number of youth to examine a number of youth novels that have been read, and sixteen interviews with college students in the first and third grade have also been done.

The purpose of this master's thesis is to examine how a Swedish public library's collection of books on African history looks like, who the writers are and how Africa and its history areportrayed. The focus of the analysis is on the front and back covers and in some cases on theinformation texts inside the books. The chosen library is the city library of Umeå. The 15books examined were found on the shelf classified as Kp ? the classification for African history according to the Swedish SAB-classification system.

This thesis presents a general definition of science education and earth science education.An inventory has been conducted of published material during the years 2011-2013, withthe start in 2013 and working backwards for international publications and with no timelimits in time for Swedish publications. Different databases were used during April 2013 forthe inventory.The thesis organizes and analyses published material in earth science education in a tablewith a following discussion.The purpose with the inventory was to investigate the amount and content ofprevious year?s publications in earth science education. Concept inventories were foundto be the most common subject of the found material, followed by virtual field studies. Thelargest amount of publications was published in North America.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to study how three public libraries in the west of Sweden have arranged their fiction for adults on shelves and what the possibilities for fiction retrieval are in their Online Public Access Catalogues OPAC. The theoretical framework includes a practical part consisting of Jarmo Saartis ideas about shelf arrangement and a theoretical part consisting of Annelise Mark Pejtersens different dimensions. The methods used in the case study are three interviews with librarians, visits in the libraries and searching in the libraries OPACs. Furthermore, we have summarized relevant literature about this subject in a summary of research. The analysis shows that our three libraries have arranged their fiction in a traditional way according to Saartis ideas about shelf arrangement.

This essay focuses on tourists' information seeking. The main focus was to examine whether there is a connection between how the informants in different tourist styles the different tourist styles are presented by Eva Wolf as the tourist of recreation, action, culture, compromise, and individualism seek information to their forthcoming vacation. The result was reached through a qualitative method, where ten informants with various tourist roles were interviewed separately. The informants were chosen by personal contacts. In addition to these interviews, three representatives from the tourist industry were contacted and interviewed by e-mail.

Communication is an important part of any multi-agent system. There are different ways of communicating and they have different effects on a multi-agent system. This project describes and evaluates two different ways of communication, implicit and explicit. To compare the two methods, two experiments have been executed. The result of the experiments have been compared and discussed.

The purpose of our research was to examine whether the acceptance and diffusion of RFID technology among the employees at public libraries in Sweden, follow the classic diffusion of innovation model. RFID or Radio Frequency Identification, is a technology that uses radio frequency and microchip technology to track items, in our case, library books and other library materials. Diffusion is the process by which, in our case, the RFID technology is adopted by the library staff. The purpose of this study was to examine what factors influenced the acceptance and adoption of RFID among the library staff. We used Everett Rogers' Diffusion of innovation theory as our framework.

In public libraries there seems to be an unspoken consensus on what literary quality is. At the same time librarians are always eager to express the opinion that quality lies in the eye of the beholder. Quality is, it is said, something that you don t have to define. But at the same time it s up to everyone to decide what quality means to them. What I have been missing from the discussion in libraries about literary quality is a theoretical awareness about what it means to divide literature into higher and lower spheres.

The aim of this master?s thesis is to examine how managers in some public libraries are using performance measurements and to what extent decision making is based on the results. The main questions posed are:??What performance measurements and indicators are used in the libraries examined???What is the attitude towards performance measurements among library managers???How and to what extent are performance measurements and indicators used in the process of decision making???What improvement would library managers wish regarding the development of performance measurements in public libraries?The theory is based on a model of evaluation of the public sector in addition to general steps of evaluation of quality and performance measurement results. The investigation is based on qualitative interviews with seven managers of public libraries in Sweden.

The increased popularity of e-books in the Swedish publiclibraries started a debate in newspapers and library journalsbecause of the increase in costs, which this popularity hadled to. The main subject of the debate was the businessmodel provided by the e-book vendor Elib, which accordingto some ruins the libraries financially. In this thesis, opinionarticles have been analyzed using a theoretical model ofcultural politics by the Danish Library and Informationscience researcher Dorthe Skot-Hansen. The results of thestudy showed that people from the library field, publishersand authors were the ones contributing to the debate. Theanalysis of the articles showed that the model of culturalpolitics which consists of four general motives: socialchange, education, economic growth and entertainment wasvisible in the articles.