This study examines the closure of public libraries, and the nonprofit organizations takeover of them as a phenomenon. The aim is to understand why the nonprofit takeover is common and what the takeover symbolizes and if the discourse in media invokes the views on libraries and the profession.Interviews were made with librarians, politicians and representatives of a nonprofit organization to study different sides of the phenomenon. Other empirical data were found in local and national newspapers and media-channels. I discovered that public libraries are highly valued by both politicians and the community. The study also showed that a library in a community makes people feel valued.

With this master thesis I wanted to find out whether Erik Fichtelius, an SVT employee, interview project with prime minister Göran Persson is acceptable according to the public service ideology. In order to do that I used Swedish newspaper articles to analyse the so called Fichtelius affair. I also gathered material on SVT and the public service ideology. The master thesis is based on sociologist Manuel Castells theories on mass media and television as presented in the Information Age. Castells claims that in our time different areas, such as politics and television, are melting together.

The aim of this master thesis is to study what relationship mentally disabled adults have with the public library and what factors affect their meeting with the library. The work of the library is also studied so that the experiences of the mentally disabled can be put in relation to the work performed for the group. The method used was interviews with four mentally disabled adults and one librarian responsible for the social function and availability at the library. As a theoretical framework Marianne Andersson and Dorte Skot-Hansen?s model over the profiles of the library and Michael Buckland?s barriers, which must be overcome to achieve full access to information, were used.

A qualitative study of high school student teachers' ideas about libraries and school libraries.Interviews have been conducted with future teachers about the library's role in their education,their views on library functions in high school and whether they as teachers will use theschool library. The results show that the students have had some instruction concerninghow to use the library as students, but very little as regards their future teaching. The professorsof teacher education focus on the fact that the library should be used in high schoolteaching, not how to use it. Despite this, the student teachers look very positively upon libraries.Libraries play an important part in their education and they are all sure that they asteachers will use the school library, which includes interacting with the librarian. To them, themost important school library function is to allow pupils to seek information..

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.

Nowadays Wireless LAN is playing a more and more important role in network systems. After 1999, in which the IEEE organization published its Wireless Local Network standard 802.11[1], many people saw the advantages of the standard but also the lack of support for multimedia streaming. A lot of research work has been done on the proposed IEEE 802.11e standard draft during the past 4 years. It is supposed to be able to fully support Quality of Service. The final version will be published early in 2004.

In this paper we have chosen to work with both the background to the Library Act § 7a and followed the process of creating the library plan of Helsingborg City Library. We have tried to follow the process through the public text documents that are available. We start by giving a background to the library act and its additional § 7a. Then we give a recap of the emergence of the modern public libraries in Sweden during the last century until today. When the working group at the City Library in Helsingborg was working with the library plan, they had to take in count the strategic goals set up by Region Skåne, since Helsingborg is place in that area.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the points of view of three groups of actors about their local learning center and its collaboration with the library. By interviewing groups of actors from the municipal sector, the library staff and students, I aim to investigate their associations of the learning centre, what kind of services it should offer, and how they understand the role of the library staff in specific collaboration between the public library and the adult education administration. The study design is based on Gunnar Grepperud?s and Terje Thomsen?s three missions for a local learning centre; the mission of a broker, a meeting place and a motivator. I also use Carol Kuhlthau?s levels of mediation as an approach to investigate how the actors want the library staff to work in relation to the centre.

The purpose of my essay is to study the current debate on public library as a meeting place in the Swedish daily press. I have examined how the meeting function is used and how it is perceived and what it might mean to the public library. Through a selection process, I chose 18 relevant newspaper articles from the year 2006 to 2012. By implementing a content analysis, three themes were distinguished; ?the meeting place as a place to reside on?, ?the meeting place as an inclusion? and ?the meeting place as a culture and activity house? I have used Andersson, Scot-Hansen and Rabers theoretical models of the library's roles for my analysis.

This is a thesis about an upper secondary  school library and its role as a pedagogkal resour­ce. My purpose has been to find out about the views and experiences of the staff at the school library and twelve teachers at the upper secondary school  conceming the school library as a pedagogical resource. Fourteen  qualitative interviews have been accomplished, twelve  with teachers and the rest with the staff of the school library. All the interviewees seem to think that their school library has an important function as a pedagogical resource and both the librarian and the teachers have given me some examples of occasions when the library has been used as a pedagogkal resource. This school library is mostly used as a complement to other pedagogical resources but for some longer projects with an investigative character it could sometimes be used as the main source according to the answers in these fourteen  interviews..

The aim of this master thesis is to investigate the design of the reference service and its development that Internet has caused in college/university libraries when it comes to the service provided to the user. I want to examine the quality of this development from the view of the librarians, and also investigate their attitude and how they deal with this development.The following questions were asked:? How has Internet changed the reference service at college/university libraries?? How do the librarians look upon the possible change of quality in the reference service when the Internet is involved?? What attitude do the librarians hold toward this development where Internet is used in the reference service and how do they deal with it?The method used was qualitative interviews. A total of six librarians from Blekinge tekniska högskola, Halmstad högskola, Lunds universitet and Växjö universitet have been interviewed.The theories and models used were ?media richness?, a quality framework including ?quality aspects of a service?, and social psychology and its ?reasons for a positive/negative attitude on an organisations change?.The result shows that Internet has brought more sources of information and additional ways to contact the library.

This paper aims to investigate how Helsingborg?s city library?s visi-tors feel about computer games being available for lending and in which way computer gamers see Helsingborg?s city library as a resource. This was examined first with a study of 100 of the library?s visitors and then with five interviews with computer gamers and an interview with the librarian responsible for purchasing games.The study showed that most visitors were neutral to having games at the library and of the ones that were not neutral many more were positive than negative. Of the five gamers who were inter-viewed, there were several who had borrowed games in the past.

The focus of this two year's master thesis is on participation of children at the TioTretton Library, a library strictly for 10-13 year olds. No adults, except the library staff are allowed in this library. To build on this aim the objectives of this thesis is centred on the questions:How does the library staff view their specific library's mission? What are the conditions for children's participation at TioTretton Library? Based on the relevant theory of participation, how participatory are the children in the library's activities? What significance has TioTretton Library's work with children participation for the children's ability to empowerment?The theoretical framework is mainly centred upon the Ladder of Participation designed by R. A.

The purpose of this master thesis is to investigate what the users/visitors do at the Filipstads Bergslags Library when they are there. The questions we asked were "What do the visitors do when they are at the library?" and "How do the visitors give priority to the librarys services?" From these two questions we asked a third "How do the visitors view the library and its functions and what function do they see as the most important to them?" The method we used was a user study and we did this at the request of the management at the library. A questionnaire was constructed and handed out in a pilot study. We made some changes in the questionnaire before we started to hand it out at the library.

The aim of this study is to examine how teenage boysperceive the public library. How do they utilize the resourcesprovided by a public library? What are their thoughtsregarding what a public library offers in terms of services toits visitors? Four qualitative interviews with teenage boyswere done for the purpose of this study. The study showsthat these individuals perceive the library as a resource foryoungsters, women, elders or people with disabilities orspecial needs, but not themselves..