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.

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.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to investigate the factors of children?s voluntarily reading in their spare time. We also want to know if the children choose non-fiction books for their voluntarily reading. The method as well as the empirical basis of this study is qualitative, with interviews of twenty-eight children in ages between 9 and 12 years. We conducted nine interviews with 3?4 children in each group.

This study is performed as an Archive, Library and museum master?s thesis in two years studies. The overall aim is to investigate and analyze what the term Manga means in a library and information science context. The concept of Manga has different meanings depending on whether we start from a Japanese or a Swedish context. Manga is integrated in the Japanese society while Manga often is associated with youth culture or a separate genre in Sweden.

The aim of this Master's thesis is to investigate the importance of subject expertise for academic librarians in Skåne. Virtually all librarians in Sweden have studied other subjects besides library and information science (LIS) before becoming librarians, and in this thesis we ask what happens to this expertise. How many librarians can be said to have a good background in the subjects they are working with? Do academic librarians use their subject knowledge on the job? Does it make a difference what subject one has studied when it comes to job opportunities? What do librarians themselves think of the importance of subject expertise? We are also interested in finding out how subject expertise fits in with the growing professionalization of librarianship.A quantitative questionnaire was sent to 195 academic librarians at four different institutes of higher education in Skåne. A total of 107 librarians answered questions about their LIS education, subject background and current job as well questions on how important they perceived a subject background to be for themselves and for academic librarians in general.

The object of this thesis is to direct attention onto female inmates who is a disregarded user group within the discipline of library and information sciences. This study has been performed on location at the Hinseberg correctional institution where nine female criminal offenders constitute the empirical foundation of our inquiry. The question proposed for solution is as follows: Is there a correlation between socio-cultural prerequisites and the reading habits of the female inmates - and if so how can it be described? Among the conclusions that we have drawn from our study is that the socio-cultural environment has an influence on the well-being of the inmates which in its turn has an impact on their reading. However, the effects on their mental state vary and consequently so does also 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 municipality of Falkenberg is a result of a unification of several smaller municipalities in 1971, each one with a small library. This left Falkenberg with an unusual large amount of smaller branch libraries. The object of this thesis is to describe and try to understand the political conflicts that have erupted during the period 1971-1994. Through a case study containing press clippings from the local newspaper, different reports, political meeting protocols, a historical background of the library and a study of library specific norms and regulations I can create an image of the heated debate. The participants in this debate can be divided into politicians and civil servants and the conflict circles round the fact that from an economical perspective, there is not enough budget to keep all the small, local libraries.

This master thesis was written in the purpose to study how the location and access to computers in the physical realm of the public library reflects the undergoing changes in the public libraries role in Swedish society. This study is done in a form of a case study of three small public libraries. All of them were in the process of transforming both their physical and virtual space. The thesis focuses on where in the library the computers are placed and how their location interacts with the libraries main tasks. It also focuses on the analysis of the relationship between these two elements and how that relationship reflects the alteration of the public libraries place in society.

During the last decades the evolution of information technology and the increasing ability to access information have been discussed in many ways. In the beginning the focus was on the technology but now the discussion is more and more about the use of information and how to develop knowledge out of it. There is an ongoing discussion about the difference between knowledge and information. The subject of this Master s thesis is to find out if and how the Swedish elementary school has written into its mission statements to help the pupils to become information literate. For this purpose I have examined literature about information literacy and pedagogic as well as legislation and other documents that control how the Swedish elementary schools work.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to investigate the factors of children?s voluntarily reading in their spare time. We also want to know if the children choose non-fiction books for their voluntarily reading. The method as well as the empirical basis of this study is qualitative, with interviews of twenty-eight children in ages between 9 and 12 years. We conducted nine interviews with 3?4 children in each group.

The public libraries in Sweden has an obligation to serve all of its citizens, but despite of this they often fail to include their LGBTQ-patrons. Since the year of 2008 RFSL (the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights) have arranged a specially designed certification-process based on normcritical criterias that a chosen institution should fulfill to make their work more inclusive for LGBTQ-people. Sollentuna is the first municipal in Sweden to certificate all of their libraries. This study aims to examine what the certification have meant for the public library in Sollentuna and how a normcritical view can contribute to include LGBTQ-patrons at the library. As a method we used a qualitative interview-study to get a full picture of the certification-process and its influence on the public library of Sollentuna.

In this Master's thesis we investigate the collection management regarding fiction for adults. The apprehension of fiction has changed over the years. From the beginning it was considered to be mostly educational rather than being the purpose of entertainment. As for today these views are not opposites to each other. Regarding this we discuss the problem concerning terms of quality.

In this Masters thesis we investigate query expansion using an electronic thesaurus. We formed 30 topics from the library and information science field. For each topic three searches were made in the bibliographic database LISA Library and Information Science Abstracts via CSA Cambridge Scientific Abstracts. LISA has an electronic thesaurus attached. We used this thesaurus to form baseline queries, baseline queries expanded with synonyms, and baseline queries expanded with both synonyms and related terms.

This Master's thesis aims to investigate the reference interview using the discourse analytical method discourse psychology. The reference interview has been studied thoroughly, and its importance has been proven repeatedly within the field of Library and Information Science (LIS). However, it has never been studied from a discourse analytical point of view before.The material for our study was gathered at Malmö public library, and consists of 10 tape-recorded and then transcribed reference interviews. Our study shows that there are several discourses within the reference situation. The dominating discourse, the reference interview discourse, is found within all the reference interviews.