The aim of this master thesis is to discuss the access to literature and reading by mentally retarded persons, and how this is affected by Library and care taking staffs awareness of mentally retarded persons needs of literature and reading. The reason why we decided to choose this essay topic, is that there is a lack of research about mentally retarded persons relationship with libraries, literature and reading in the field of Library- and information science. This groups needs must be brought to sight, so that they can take part in the literature just as anyone else, on their own conditions. Our study involves interviews with four librarians, three reading representatives and a co-ordinator at the Easy-to-Read Foundation. We can establish that all of our informants prove to have significant knowledge about mentally retarded persons and their needs of literature and reading.

A Large part of the education provided at colleges and universities of today requires for thestudent to be more independent in their studies. This demands that the physical space,where the students choose to study, is designed in a way that can encourage and supportlearning. It seems as though that many of the learning spaces of today don?t always meetthe students? needs. The university Library at the University of Umeå is currently planningto design new learning spaces for the students.

The story of the forest - A folded textile wall for flexible rooms in public spacesIn the story of the forest the dragonfly is spinning yarn shiny as the sun. In the story of the forest almost everything can happen and almost everything is also happen there.Inspiration from Lennart HellsingThe goal in this exam work was to create a calm, playful space for children in public spaces. A place where children can hide and relax without being disrupted by the surrounding, a place where their imagination can grow and take place. The goal was also to make a flexible space for public spaces that could be used in different ways. Today many libraries want to be more than a Library, they will work as a meeting place and you can find several activities to join in.

The aim of this two years master?s thesis in Library and information science is to study how children and librarians recommend books through the website Barnens bibliotek. In the scope of this aim it also tries to answer the following questions: What qualities in books do children and librarians respectively emphasize when they write book recommendations? How do they formulate the recommendations? And finally, how do their respective recommendations differ?To examine these aspects a total of 50 book recommendations were chosen and analysed through an hermeneutic approach. Out of these 50, 30 were written by children and 20 were written by librarians.

The purpose of the study is to reach knowledge about how public librarians understands and describes environmental scanning as a working process in a Swedish public Library. The study consists of 5 interviews with public librarians working within the same organization. The empirical material is presented in two ways. The first one is what aspects of the external world the librarians find important. The second is through a theoretical framework based on Magnus Hoppes model of environmental scanning, including communication and cognitive processes aswell as ways of analyzing information from the external world.

The aim of the study has been to find out children?s librarians? views on and management of media that contains topics with a controversial nature and also to find out how this affects the public Library as a democratic institution. We have conducted the study by interviewing six children?s librarians. By using Vestheim?s terms value rationality and instrumental rationality, we have been categorizing the answers from our informants and thus identified two different points of view.

This work addresses how the book boxes that are shipped to different schools, that don?t havelibraries themselves, from the city Library are composed in Karlstad municipality and whatbooks they may contain. A case study is made to find out which books can be included in theboxes. An interview with staff from Karlstad City Library is made and two different kinds ofbook boxes are analyzed. There is one book box with children books that have a genderperspective and one with fiction children books.The books are analyzed and the conclusion of this work is that it is important to know whatthe children are reading and how books can influence them.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how public libraries in Norrbotten provide multilingual media and how the commitment is legitimized. In January 2014 there was a change to the guidelines for the International Library?s service for providing multilingual media. The responsibility for the provision of this service was also changed. The result shows there has been different ways of implementing the guidelines in practice; this has led to inequalities in the local Library service.We have assembled data through qualitative interviews with five different public libraries in the north of Sweden.

Local history collections are fairly common among the Swedish public libraries and these collections often contain older or rare material. There are no national policies concerning the preservation of rare books at the public libraries, and the librarians of public libraries may lack that knowledge. The aim of this study is to examine librarians? attitudes toward their libraries? local history collections. We interviewed five librarians in the county of Västra Götaland and also made a small observation study of their local history collections.

Libraries exist around us and for most of us they are a part of our every day life. But how often do we stop and think about their meaning?Libraries in fiction are usually not the center of the narrative, they play a role quietly in the background and offer a backcloth to the story. Yet they are a vital part of the story. Without them a big part of the magic in the stories would be lost.And what is their role in our lives? What do the libraries mean to the books they harbor, the readers who seek them out and society in which they have their axiomatic role?This essay?s focus is my story ?Between the shelves?, which is about the young girl Julia and the mysterious passageway she discovers in her local Library.

vuxnas läsning av skönlitteratur I became happier and wiser: young adults reading of fiction [123[upps-01.gif This Masters thesis explores young adults 18-26 years old, reading of fiction: their reading preferences, the meaning of reading and their access to literature. A study was made by way of a questionnaire, including 56 young adults, and seven qualitative interviews with two groups: one at a folk highschool and the other at a public Library. The theories we have used to analyse the results are: theories of gender and youth, theories of literary genres, reader-response criticism, literature sociology and the theories of cultural sociology by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In the analysis the results are compared to other studies of reading habits. Results from this study show that the young adults read fiction from several genres among popular- and quality literature.

The aim of this essay is to examine three separate Swedish public libraries and their respective websites on the grounds of the usability sciences. I firstly had to summarize the main properties of the usability-field in order to gain an extended knowledge of its purposes and possible usage for today?s Library systems. I was then able to apply the extended knowledge in the examination of the three Library websites and the purpose of determining whether or not they were designed according to the standards set by the usability-sciences.Usability is a rather new science that deals with the dissection and examination of computer-based systems, in order to find the key components that make systems user-friendlier. With user needs being the main focus of its research, usability tries to meet all the different needs of the modern user and construct systems that are less system-centered and more user-centered.

The purpose of this thesis is to study how children's librarians in public libraries use non-fiction books in their work to promote reading. My research questions are: What methods do children's librarians use för promoting non-fiction books? Are there children who can gain more from non-fiction books than other children do? Are there any differences in working with fiction and non-fiction books? To answer these questions I have interwieved five children's librarians about their methods, attitudes and thoughts on non-fiction books.The result shows that all of the librarians use non-fiction when it comes to promotion reading but not to the same extent. Some hardly use it at all, mainly because the schools that they are serving demands fiction books when practicing reading skills. while others use it but in less extent than fiction, as a way of separating the Library reading from school work either because they want to keep the experience of reading in the Library apart from school work or because they find it more efficient to do so.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to investigate articles in Swedish Library journals on children?s reading from gender and sex perspectives. Gender theory as it has been developed by Yvonne Hirdman and Robert W. Connell is used to analyze the articles. The thesis includes a chapter on previous research in the fields of gender in relation to children, reading and the Library.

The aim of this master?s thesis is to examine the discourses aboutthe future of Malmö City Library expressed by the chief librariansSven Nilsson and Elsebeth Tank. Furthermore, our intention is tostudy the relation between the two. The questions posed in thestudy are: how does chief librarian Sven Nilsson express the futureof Malmö public Library between 1989-1997? How does chieflibrarian Elsebeth Tank express the future of Malmö City Librarybetween 2008-2010? How does Sven Nilsson?s and ElsebethTank?s thoughts and visions of the future correlate?Our theoretical and methodical building ground is in the discourseanalytical field, with Ernesto Laclau?s and Chantal Mouffe?stheories about discourse and society, as startingpoint.