The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to present a survey of how Swedish libraries provide information services for children. In this thesis ?information? means non-fiction material and ?children? do not include preschool children. The method used is knowledge overview and the material (mostly Master theses in LIS published January 2001-June 2006) is related to user studies of children as information seekers.

The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to investigate the library needs of fourteen-to-fifteen-year-olds. We have limited the investigation to the significance of libraries for the teenagers in their leisure time. Our focus is the public library with a particular reference to the plans for a new local public library with a youth profile in Malmö. With a departure point in the idea that young people?s use and view of libraries is to a large extent depending on factors such as social and cultural background and lifestyle, we chose to do a qualitative interview study with eight teenagers.

The purpose of this study is to examine if digital public libraries are serendipitous environments. Serendipity in this instance is defined as finding something unexpected and valuable, while searching for something else.A survey was conducted at two Swedish digital public libraries, where the patrons were asked to fill in a questionnaire online. The questions were based on the work on serendipitous digital environments by Lori McCay-Peet, as well as considerations of human factors that could possibly influence serendipity.The result indicate that a majority of patrons experience serendipity at the digital library, although it?s still more common to do so at the physical library or on other web sites. The result also confirms the importance of taking human factors into account when studying serendipity.

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.

The purpose of this master thesis is to describe and analyse the development of the library history in the municipality of Karlsborg. This is done with a comparison to the library development in Sweden as a whole and in particular to the cities of Lidköping and Halmstad. I have worked according to the following questions: 1. How did the libraries develop before the municipality took over? 2.

This master's thesis is about alternative career opportunities for library and information science graduates. Ever since the beginning of our education we have been interested in working outside of the traditional libraries. Now that we are about to receive our degrees in library and information science we are doubtful if the competence we have obtained is enough to meet the demands of the labour market. The employment field we have been studying in this master's thesis is information management, since this is a field that we find comparable to library and information science. Our study involves a qualitative survey amongst recruiting companies to investigate how the recruiters value different educations, competences and personal skills when they employ staff within the field of information management.

This study titled When the spaces dominate A study of the school as disciplinary rooms is a study where the emphasis is on quality and where the results are based on observations. The purpose of the research was to analyse rooms and other artefacts in the school as seen from Foucault?s analysis of power. He emphasised that power is expressed in human relationships. To understand how that power is used one can study the techniques adopted and resistance offered.

The aim of this Master's thesis is to study what place public libraries have in local politics, particularly from the point of view of the politicians. To answer this, I have interviewed politicians, participated as a silent observer of a public debate, and studied articles on library politics in newspapers and other press. The results show that politicians in general have a positive view of libraries and good co-operation with library professionals, and that they have a fairly up-to-date view of libraries. They are, however, less interested in library issues in general, and are often complacent with the way things are already running. The newspaper studies show that library issues are usually only discussed when a specific library is somehow in danger.

Little attention has been paid in the literature to libraryassistants in Swedish public libraries. In this bachelor thesis,the professional role, work duties, career prospects and statusof library assistants are examined at two public libraries.Because of a scarcity of published information on thedevelopment of this profession in Swedish public libraries,retired library assistants, as well as currently employedlibrary assistants, librarians and a library head wereinterviewed.Since the ?80s, work duties of library assistants havechanged, with a reduction in some of the more manualaspects of library work, the development of new duties and,overall, an increasing similarity in the duties performed bylibrary assistants and librarians.Additionally, the public perception of library assistants as acategory distinct from librarians was investigated bydistributing questionnaires to library patrons. Contrary toexpectations prompted by statements in the literature, asubstantial portion of visitors was found to be aware of thetwo separate categories.Library assistants at Swedish libraries have no careerprospects, unless they undertake studies in their own freetime and at their own cost, and obtain a librarian degree. Adifference between the situation of library assistants inSweden and corresponding professional categories in a fewother countries is that, at present and for several years, noformal education for library assistants has been available inSweden.

Intresset för kartbaserad information på Internet ökar i rask takt. Samtidigt växer önskan av att sprida geografiskt material i form av interaktiva webbkartor utan att vara hänvisad till dyra, professionella GIS (Geografiska Informationssystem) programvaror. Idag finns det en rad open- source lösningar på webbaserade GIS som utan kostnad får utnyttjas, spridas och byggas ut efter egna önskemål. I detta examensarbete undersöks ett 20-tal open-source webbGIS-produkter enligt en allmängiltig mall som vi har tagit fram för att kunna jämföra olika lösningar enligt klart specificerade kriterier. Dessa omfattar bl.a.

This master thesis is an attempt to study the joint-use solutions between the public library and the public preschool in the local district Kristineberg in the community of Borås. The two main questions are; what kind of joint-use library is the activity at Kristineberg? What kind of advantages and disadvantages do the actors experience from the joint-use activity at Kristineberg? The analysis is based upon the interviews with eight informants with different connections to the joint-use library and public preschool. I also use documental analysis and literature studies. Relevant theories, such as Andersson´s and Skot-Hansen´s analysis of the role of the public library and Bundys, Imhoff´s and Dornseif´s theories about joint-use libraries are presented and later used in the analysis.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to investigate how actors involved in a municipal's adult education view students access to information- and library resources. The adult education in the municipal is on contract which means that there are several different actors involved in the realization of the adult education. The raised questions in this study deals with; libraries role within adult education, students needs for becoming information literate and where responsibilities for students access to libraries lies. We used a qualitative method which includes interviews with two principles, a controller, three pedagogues and a librarian. The empirical data is analysed against taxonomies and categories which originates from the theories of David Loertscher and Christine Bruce.

The aim of this master thesis is to measure library service quality in two groups of libraries, newly developed and well established, and to see if there are any differences in the users perception of the dimensions in LibQUAL+. The thesis also examines the different perception of quality for the user groups: undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty. Another approach is to test the Swedish translation of LibQUAL+. Different theories on service quality are presented but the main theories are from the marketing perspective. The grounding and development of LibQUAL+ is described as well as the use of the instrument in different libraries.

This study examines the scholarly communication activities in two scientific fields, chemistry and economics, in a Polish context. The dissertation aims at investigating what characterises the publishing choices of researchers and what supplementary forms for the dissemination of research output are used by scholars. In addition, the paper is looking into what are the views and awareness of open access and institutional repositories within this scientific community. This thesis gives the results of semi-structured interviews and an online survey at two academic faculties at a Polish technical university. As its theoretical framework, the study uses Whitley?s theory of the intellectual and social organisation of academic fields and Latour and Woolgar?s study regarding various motivations for publishing.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate how libraries market themselves in social media and why they do it. I have studied a certain public library?s process of introducing social media into its marketing mix, the preparations for this process and the effects of these marketing methods.The theoretical framework for this thesis is based on relationship marketing, a theory which focuses on relationships, networks and interaction. My main method has been semi-structured interviews with a librarian at the relevant library, with the manager of the library and with the head of the municipality?s department of communication.The results of my studies show that marketing on social media is a positive and important thing for libraries.