The purpose of the thesis is to describe the developing of the branch libraries of the public library of Kristianstad between the years of 1967 and 1977. The municipality of Kristianstad was grounded by a unification of the city of Kristianstad and ten small municipalities. The fusion takes place in three different stages during the years of 1967, 1971 and 1974. The first stage included the city of Kristianstad and the municipalities of Araslöv, Nosaby, Träne and Vä. The municipality of Araslöv got free small villages and village of Färlöv was the biggest one.

The aim of this master thesis is to examine the opinions of the students of Linköping University regarding the role of the university library in their learning process. The study addresses the student?s expectations and satisfaction regarding the library services. The questions we seek to answer are: What are the students? conceptions of Linköping University Library as a part of their learning process? What expectations do the students have regarding Linköping University Library? Does the library fulfil the students? expectations? In what way has the library?s pedagogical ambition reached the students? What are the students? opinions about the user education? The study is based on a web survey complemented with interviews.

The purpose of this master?s thesis is to study an electronic reference service from a user perspective. By qualitative interviews with eight students the thesis examines their information behaviour, why and when they use the service, the user?s experiences of the service and the communication with the librarian. The users have all used the Swedish electronic reference service Fråga biblioteket ? Forskningsbibliotek.

In 1995, the World Trade Organization WTO was established. Today WTO has nearly 150 member countries, accounting for over 97 percent of the world trade. WTO has a number of agreements and one of them is the General Agreement on Trade in Services GATS. GATS control the service sector, and the public library is a small part of this sector. The purpose of this study is to examine the Swedish debate about GATSs possibility to affect the public library.

The purpose of the present qualitative study is to create knowledge about librarydigital services and their marketing to patrons with disabilities in Armenia, on theexample of the National Library of Armenia, as well as, to discover opinions of theNLA librarians and patrons with disabilities about the importance of library digitalservices to people with disabilities. Literature review and qualitative interviewing has been employed as methods to collect the empirical data. The results have been analyzed and discussed based on the library-marketing model of marketing research, marketing segmentation, marketing mix strategy and marketing evaluation suggested by Koontz & Gubbin (2010). It has been concluded, that 1) e-accessibility issomething new at the NLA and the NLA does not provide equally available knowledge, resources, services, facilities to patrons with disabilities, because of the following main challenges: lack of continuous funding and support from the state, lack of appropriate facilities and technologies, lack of qualified staff, and historicallyinherited library infrastructure impediments; 2) no library service marketing is conducted to patrons with disabilities at the NLA; 3) the opinions are that provisionwith such services is very important to people with disabilities, since they allow those people to gain access and use information in formats adopted to their various needs, and, of course, they become integrated into the modern society. The important role of a library as a non-discriminator and copyright protector in a developing country when delivering digital library services to patrons with disabilities has also been discovered..

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine and present the programmes and activities of school library centres in order to see what functions (purposes) they can fulfil in a municipality and also if and how they can contribute to school library development. In order to fulfil my purpose I have made qualitative interviews with five librarians from school library centres. The theoretical framework is primarily based on David Loertscher?s.

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 has been to examine the importance of libraries for girls leisure time in secondary school. Focus has been on the use of the library as a leisure activity. Interviews were carried out with six girls of the ages 13 to 16. The conclusion of the study is that the library is of importance for the girls mostly through its books. Reading turned out to be an important leisure activity for the girls and the books provided by the library were of significance for their identity development.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate new knowledge about how children search for library material and which strategies they use, and if the latest research gives any answers whether we should adapt systems and services or teach information seeking in a better way. In this thesis knowledge is understood as research publications but also results from projects in library practise, and studies concerning children 6 to 18 years old are included. The method used is a knowledge survey. We have gathered and evaluated documentation from different sources like citation and reference databases within the field of library and information science. The result implicates that there are, both in old and new documentation, three main search strategies children use in their search for information in a library context; they browse, they search in library catalogues and they use some sort of reference service.

The web is a constantly growing medium that presumably plays an increasing role in public library reference services. In order to provide high quality reference service the librarians need to be able to master this medium. Therefore it is interesting to get an understanding of how librarians actually use the web. The aim of this Master s thesis is to investigate what web search tools are used by public librarians in reference service. Furthermore, the aim is to get an understanding of how the librarians think about those tools and what background factors influence their selection of tools.

This thesis examines how library employees experience the library as a meeting place. Our questions are: What effect has the concept of a "library as a meeting-place" for library staff?How do they see the library as a meeting place? How do they see their workplace as a venue for meetings? The respondents interviewed work in public libraries. We were inspired by a cultural geographic theory that we re-designed. The following divisions were made in order to give the work a definitive structure:The "mental space"The library as a meeting place on a global and universal level;The "conceived space"Librarians and planners' thinking on the specific library as a meeting place;The "living space"How library staff perceive that the library is used as a meeting place in reality.In our analysis, we use a phenomenographic qualitative interpretive methodology.

This master thesis deals with classifications schemes in multicultural societies. The aim is to investigate how well the Swedish classification scheme SAB has been adapted to the multicultural society of today. I have done a comparative analysis between the SAB and the UDC to see if an international classification scheme would have better possibilities to represent a multicultural society. I have asked some institutions that have a large collection of documents dealing with minority cultures how they experienced the SAB. I have also read literature about classification theories and compared universal enumerative, facetted and special classification schemes to see if the possibilities to classify documents on, or related to minorities differed from each other.

The aim of this master?s thesis is to examine the accessibility for persons with disabilities to service, materials, and the library building in one Swedish public library, and also to see what guides the development of accessibility at this library. In order to do this we have studied guidelines and political documents to se how this library responds to them. To our case study, data have also been collected by qualitative interviews, and observation of what this library offers impaired persons at the library?s web site, in special materials, facilities, and the functionality of the library building.

The aim of this study is to examine how the adult students in the Adult Education Initiative called Kunskapslyftet, experience their use of the Main Public Library in Linköping and how the librarians experience the change in their working situation after Adult Education Initiative has started in July 1997. Methods used in the survey are interviews with librarians and students in the Adult Education Initiative. I have also distributed questionnaires to some of the adult students and studied literature that describe students use of libraries. The result shows that the students generally are satisfied with the service they get from the librarians at the Main Public Library. It also shows that what the students mostly asked for, are help to search information about a subject and to find literature in the library.

This thesis presents a new way of providing library users with reference services, namely chat (text based digital reference service in real time). Our research questions focus on the role of reference service, a comparison of chat reference to other reference forms, and the interest for real-time, digital reference. Our literature review covered the areas of digital reference and reference theory, the results of which showed that an ongoing debate hardly exists among Swedish librarians on the topic of reference work. We interviewed librarians from the three different Swedish chat reference projects existing at the time of our study. Most interviewees were very positive about chat reference.