The purpose of this essay is to examine how a newly built library and an old library from the sixties work out of an experience and feeling oriented view. Are the fundamental conditions of an old library compatible with the library standards of today? To be able to carry out this examination we have chosen two rather small Swedish libraries. One is the public library of Hässleholm, which opened in the year 2000, and the other is the public library of Kristianstad opened in 1965. The material used to attain the purpose of the study consists of literature studies and qualitative observations and 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.

Since its ratification in Sweden in 1990, The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) has become a part of the law of nations and intended to suffuse the public sector. The purpose of this paper is to examine how children?s library consultants work to implement the CRC in children?s library activities in Sweden. We have tried to discover whether the CRC is basic in the work of children?s library consultants or if is rather employed to strengthen certain areas or projects.

The purpous of this master?s thesis is to explore how the swedish public library evolved between 1890-1911, before the state implemented the library reform in 1912. The material used to cunduct the study concists mainly of texts published during the time frame of the thesis in the form of books, booklets and articles from Folkbiblioteksbladet, a journal dedicated to the subject of the swedish public library.Drawing upon Habermas theory of the structural transformation of the public sphere and Bourdieus theories about taste as social distinction and symbolic capital, the thesis seeks to show how the public participated in the evolvement of the public library and which aspects of society that contributed to the public library?s establishment as an institution. The findings are also discussed in relation to previous research of the history of the Swedish public library.

The purpose of this master's thesis is to examine how the public library communicates with young users through the library web sites. Four Swedish public library web pages for children are analysed. In the analysis the web pages are treated as a combination of semiotic resources that, communicating as a whole, hold a meaning potential. In order to identify the underlying meaning of the whole I have applied the tools of Kress' & van Leeuwen's visual social semiotics to the chosen web pages.The information value, the framing and the salience of each composition is examined and analysed, as is the size of frame, the perspective and the vertical angle of a selection of images from each web page. The results of the semiotic analysis are then discussed and related to Jochumsen et al:s four space-model and the notion of ?child perspective? and ?empowerment?.The results show that the child perspective is strongest on the web pages that represent the performative space as dominating and that empowerment is mainly represented as ?doing?, ?participating? and the ?free choice?.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to investigate the library habits of young people, age 15 to 24. Our empirical data are gathered in a survey distributed to 104 young men and women at three different public libraries. The questions are about how young people use the public library, what media and services they use and whether or not they are content with what the public library can offer them. In our analysis we have compared our results to previous research and used a model by Marianne Andersson and Dorte Skot-Hansen to determine how they use the library.

The underlying purpose of this study is to investigate how the libraries in Sweden organize and administrate the service of providing literature in other languages than Swedish. The study focuses on the central guiding principles that regulate the provision of multilingual literature and how these guidelines are implemented in to practice at the libraries. As the guidelines are closely connected to the official discourse in Sweden concerning policies targeted towards immigrants, the guidelines will be examined from a perspective of integration politics. To assemble data a survey has been conducted looking into factors such as how the libraries perceive the guidelines, how the libraries do business intelligence and user inquires to reach out to the users of the multilingual media, forms for statistics and method of working. The results points out that the libraries in their work with multilingual media are confronted with three tensions; the first tension is that between the libraries aim to promote equality and freedom for the individual and at the same time to fulfil certain collective interests and goals.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate in which aspects the public library is affected by its local community. This is re-searched by means of an exemplified case study of a Swedish public library in which we analyze governing documents and the library website with respect to environmental scanning and mar-keting of library services.The research questions are: How are the local community?s demands on the public li-brary being described in the governing document? How is the public library?s response to the demands of the local community being described in the operational plan? How are the demands of the local community, as shown in the governing document and the operational plan, re-flected in the marketing of library services on the library website?Our conclusions are that:The demands of the local community are described in a general fashion in the governing document, but there is a lack of concrete political guidelines.The public library's response to the demands of the local commu-nity is described to some length in the operational plan, but not with respect to economical factors.The demands of the local community are reflected to some length in the marketing of library services on the library website. Many of the overall themes that we identify in the governing document and the operational plan can be found in the marketing directed towards important target groups..

In most software engineering project, users are only involved in the beginning of the project as a help to design the requirements specification but users can be involved after this phase too, but is it effective to do so? With this report we would like to investigate how effective it is to involve users after the requirements specification has been written and approved. To find out how effective it is to involve the users we try some fast and simple involvement techniques on a quite far gone project. These techniques include ethnographic studies, prototypes and surveys. We also interviewed a couple of people who work with usability and finally delivered a report with our results to them to find out if they found our result relevant.

The aim of this paper is to investigate who the visitors are at a children's department at amain library in a larger municipality, and for what purpose they use it. We discuss: Is therea difference between various user groups, and if so, how do they differ'? Which library rolesdoes the children's department have? Does the children's department serve as a local libraryfor those who live in the immediate surroundings or as a main library for the whole municipality?The paper is based on a user survey performed in the spring of 1996 at the City Library ofGothenburg. 417 visitors and five staff members were interviewed.The children's department is used by various groups of people, from young children to seniorcitizens. The library roles are, among other things, an independent learning center and formaleducation support center.

The aim of this master?s thesis is to examine which ideas about the public library that appear in a selection of municipal library plans and to examine if these ideas are unanimous. The comprehensive questions are: Which ideas about the public library appear in each municipal library plan? How do the ideas agree in the different municipal library plans? The sub questions are: Which judgements of reality appear in the different library plans concerning each municipality and its library needs? How do the municipalities define the concept of development and future demands in the municipality on the basis of the judgements of reality? Which recommendations do the judgements of reality give and how is the plan of action that is established in each library plan justified? Which fundamental views of reality, i. e.

This report aims to identify and categorize suitable audit users and furthermore establish with values these users experience. The aim of the report has been fulfilled by analyzing interviews carried out with several companies using audits as a part of their risk management process. In addition to this, theories concerning management have been studied..

The purpose of this essay is to examine how librarians perceive library plans, if they are important for their work and if so, in what ways. In order to analyze this, I have used a phenomenographic approach. My goal, by using this method, is to uncover perceptions and variations among these. The research questions are: What variations of perception of library plans exist among librarians? To what extent can the varied perceptions of library plans be linked to librarians' work? What does the variation of perception say, in relation to the expectations expressed in international and national documents, about library plans? The material used in a phenomenographic analysis consists of interviews.

The main purpose of this master's thesis is to investigate to what extent municipal politicians govern a selected public library. This means to clarify who determines the direction of the library and its services and in what way. It also involves examining the relationship between library staff and local politicians in the decision-making process. Which decisions are made by the politicians and which are left to the employees? The study is based on an investigation of a public library in a municipality over a period of ten years the 1990s.

In this qualitative user evaluation, users from the Krami-programme in Borla?nge have been interviewed on what they consider to have been positive changes in their social situation after participating in the programme. The respondents also point out factors in the programme that have supported these changes. The method consisted of interviews with five men who have undergone the Krami programme.The results show that Krami primarily helps the users to get an employment which results in the repeal of criminogenic factors. This plays an important part in the positive change of the users self-esteem, which tends to lead towards ?unlabeling? of the individual as ?criminal?.The study also indicates other factors in the program that the users found helpful in their process of change highlighting the interaction between authorities, the approach of the Krami- staff and also the common rules that the participants has to agree upon.