This master thesis deals with questions concerning facts and fiction in the world of Beatrix Potter's rabbits. The purpose is first and foremost to find the connections between the pet rabbits, that she used as art models, and the rabbits that came to life through her "tales".The method has been to gather facts through biographic reading, and to analyse Beatrix Potter's rabbit tales, using tools developed by Swedish picture book experts. The rabbit characters are thoroughly examined and so are the settings where the tales take place. Matters concerning Beatrix Potter's painting technique and illustration style as well as her literary and pictorial inspirations are dealt with.Conclusions are, that the fictive rabbit characters have indeed a lot to do with the fact that Beatrix Potter was interested in natural history and studied animal behaviour and anatomy in detail. For a long time rabbits, both wild and domesticated, were her favourite study objects which provided conditions for her rabbit fantasies.

The aim of this master thesis is to explore what role libraries play in the educational process for university students suffering from dyslexia. The question at issue is whether the library is able to meet the needs of students who have difficulty in using the libraries main resource, i.e. printed documents and information in written form. An often expressed view indicates that the modern library creates a lot of obstacles for dyslectic students. The method used is a literature study followed by an empirical study in which interviews were conducted with four students suffering from dyslexia and studying at two different universities and using different libraries.

This Master thesis was written in collaboration with the Kalmar-based consulting company Sederkvist Kommunikation. The purpose was to explore the market potential for Sederkvist Kommunikations new software Bellman Marketing. Based on these results a launch plan was created and advoice were given to Sederkvist Kommunikation as to how their new administrative tool could be introduced on the market. Data were collected through semi-structured telephone interviews. The population was Swedish so called Gazelle-companies (growth-companies listed yearly by the business newspaper Dagens Industri) and totally 27 units were examined.

Electronic availability of information resources has increasingly become an important part of academic libraries everyday vocation. This is a fact that puts impetus on the libraries to know more about the way in which electronic information is being dispersed and handled. This thesis aims to comparatively evaluate Uppsala university library´s own metadata system Summon with the publicly available equivalent Google scholar. The evaluation is based on Péter Jacsó´s theories on database evaluation which concretely puts focus on Summon and Google scholar via the use and application of ten different criteria. The uses of precision and relevance criteria were also implemented as additional evaluation tools.

The purpose of this master?s thesis is to investigate children?s librarian?s perspectives on children?s literature and reading of fiction books. This is a comparative study of Swedish and Lithuanian librarians. The main questions to be answered are how children?s librararians at public libraries motivate their selection and purchase of fiction for children and what kind of considerations there are behind the purchases.

The object for this study is a company developing and manufacturing vehicles for heavy transportation. The company distributes their products on a global market. Therefore the company is required to have efficient internal production development processes in order to successfully beat the competition. The purpose of this master thesis is to study how this particular company intends to implement their standardized theoretical product development process within their organization and how well it is done. We intend to identify and specify if the process has any unexploited capacity.

CSR is a far reaching concept and practice, whose popularity and diffusion has increased rapidly in recent years. Research indicates that CSR has made an evolutionary journey from primarily being characterized by reactiveness to develop into a risk minimizing and proactive competitive advantage and should be looked upon as an answer to heightened societal pressure and awareness. Based on a review regarding different relevant theoretical perspectives, this master thesis discusses CSR as a concept and practical matter in relation to various strategically chosen representatives of a selection of professions.Moreover, the data were collected through in-depth semi structured interviews. The findings show that CSR is a contemporary and highly context dependent phenomenon whose inherent multiplicity brings a distinct aspect of uncertainty to it, in terms of both meaning and practice. And in some parts there is a reluctance to communicate CSR due to a fear of missing out of important aspects.

The aim of this Master's thesis is to understand public library users' perceptions of librarians' attitudes to users and professional knowledge. The purpose was also to investigate the relative importance to the user of pleasant or a knowledgeable librarian. As a theoretical framework we use theory from business economy where the experience of the user is in focus. Answers were sought to the following questions: How do users perceive librarians attitudes to users? How do users perceive librarians professional knowledge? How do users want to be treated by public librarians? What kind of knowledge should public librarians have, according to users? We interviewed twelve students in university education that are users of public libraries.

Quality Assurance in Service Procurement --- Total Quality and Total Quality Management refer to popular management philosophies in organizations these days. The purchasing department has an important part in the strive for organizational quality as several studies show corporate spend is significant and increasing. In this master thesis I study the actions companies take to ensure quality in service procurement. I argue that managing quality when sourcing services is particularly tricky, because of the special characteristics that belong to services. The purpose of the study is to examine whether different actions are taken to ensure the quality of different kinds of services.

Extended Producer Responsibility (ERP) is a form of product take-back regulation that requires the producers to manage their products at the end of life. By internalising the products? entire life cycle costs into the market price the ultimate objective of such regulations is to reduce the environmental burden from the products. This Master´s thesis seeks to examine if the total life cycle cost of a product actually is borne by the producer, and if not, predict who will then take this cost. This is done by analysing the market for take-back activities in three different categories of products; electrical and electronic equipment, cars and wind power stations.

The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to investigate the female reader of science fiction literature, a genre by tradition dominated by men. Through qualitative interviews with seven female science fiction readers, the relation between the reading and the readers? lives, as well as their concepts of the science fiction genre and the community of science fiction readers, was examined. The main theoretical framework used for the analysis was Yvonne Hirdman?s gender theory, Judith Butler?s concept of identity and Louise M.

With the advent of powerful multimedia capable mobile phones, the market for mobile services is flourishing. Zenterio AB's Halfpipe Active Desktop is a complete distributed mobile service platform a with a powerful server and platform-independent client. The communication between the client and server takes place over a GPRS-capable mobile network. The purpose of this thesis is to develop a secure communications protocol for use between the Halfpipe Active Desktop client and server. This is done by determining requirements, analyzing candidate protocols and then by designing the final protocol.

The object of this master thesis was to examine the significance of fairy tales for children and the extent which children today are able to share fairy tales through the activity of the libraries. The main question was: how current were fairy tales at the investigated libraries activity for children and how current were fairy tales in todays book publication? The qualitative methods used were in the form of interviews, statistics and source studies. The theoretical literature in this thesis described the folkloristic context of the fairy tales. There was also a psychological and a pedagogical view of the possibility of the fairy tales.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine how opinions and values are expressed in BTJ?s reviews of children?s literature. According to debates reviewed and interviewed librarians, many consider BTJ to be too directing when it comes to the libraries? purchases of books. Therefore I find it important to study how the reviews are written.

The aim of this Master thesis is, from a sociocultural perspective, to investigate the views the teaching librarians at Södertörn University Library (SHB) have on learning, information literacy, and their own pedagogical role, and how their views affect user education and their ideas about the future of user education.The research questions used were: How do the teaching librarians view learning? How is this view reflected in their work with user education? How do the teaching librarians envisage user education in the future, and how do they work to reach that goal?Five semi-structured interviews were conducted with the teaching librarians at SHB. The interviews were then analysed using qualitative content analysis.The results of the study show that the teaching librarians at SHB share a sociocultural view on learning, and take a communicative oriented approach to user education. They believe that communication and interaction support learning, and in the classroom they stimulate discussions both between librarian and student, and between the students themselves. In the future, they hope for improved collaboration between librarians and academic staff, and that user education will become a natural element of the curriculum..