The subject of this two year Master's thesis in Library and Information Science is the information practices of illiterate immigrants in everyday life. The purpose is to examine how immigrants seek, identify, understand and value information sources and information, and how the practices have changed with their arrival in Sweden. It furthermore focuses on the barriers that illiterate immigrants meet in accessing and understanding information. It moreover investigates the strategies they use to overcome them.For this purpose twelve qualitative research interviews were carried out, with illiterate immigrants as well as with service providers. The theoretical concepts of the essay is information practices, which means that the information process is within a context, and information poverty, that people in different context do not have adequate and equal access to information and information sources.Using McKenzie's model of information practices, the essay concludes that illiterate immigrants are active in their information process, especially when they interact with information.

The meaning of the concept of psychosocial treatment is ambiguous. The purpose of this study was to examine how professionals within some care institutions, which provide methadone, buprenorphine or naloxone treatment, regard and carry out the psychosocial features of such treatment. Central issues discussed were; how personnel approach the psychosocial features of the treatment, what personnel regard as a focus in the psychosocial treatment, what conditions personnel consider affect treatment positively in order for it to be successful and how personnel see the relation between the medical and psychosocial features of the treatment. The method used was interviews with nine professionals in six qualitative interviews. The theoretical perspectives and concepts used in our analysis were; the theory of biological dependence, an organizational perspective, Prochaska and DiClemente's Stages of Change Model, the concept of individual reality and the concept of marginal conflict.Results show that the conditions most important for successful treatment are; that the patient has a place to live, an occupation, motivation, that the patient take responsibility for his/hers progress and have realistic expectations about the effects of the medicine.

This master's thesis studies Utländska biblioteket, a 19th century foreign literature subscription library in Karlskrona, Sweden. The aim of the thesis is to investigate Utländska biblioteket between 1835?1864.The material consists primarily of primary sources from the archive of Utländska biblioteket. The main primary sources are the library's accounts book, its minutes, and two book catalogs. Using analytical tools from Jürgen Habermas, feminist criticism of his ideas and from Pierre Bourdieu, as well as results from previous research on older library forms and female organization in the 19th century, the thesis answers questions relating to the library as a society, its members and its book collection.The investigation shows that Utländska biblioteket was a subscription library as well as a book circle.

The aim of this thesis is to explore the institutional design of Participatory Budgeting (PB) in Sweden and how the design may contribute to realize central democratic goods. The study records the different PB experiences in Sweden and focuses on one particular case, which is the only case that successfully qualifies as a genuine PB-process according to international standards and definitions. To examine this, the following questions are asked: which municipalities in Sweden have implemented Participatory Budgeting? How can the institutional design of Participatory Budgeting be described and to what extent does it enable the realization of central democratic goods? To what extent does the institutional design enable the realization of the democratic goods inclusion, popular control, considered judgment and transparency? To what extent does the institutional design enable the realization of the institutional goods of efficiency and transferability?The study is based on an institutional theory of democracy. The method used is a mixed method ideal type analysis that combines document analysis, surveys and interviews.

The purpose of this study is to illustrate if structural factors to welfare indicators and the internal organisation of handle social assistance in combination with dominating ways of living with their values and norms can be used to explain why the costs of social assistance are low in Säffle township. The character of this study is exploratory, though important aspects in this case was unknown. The empiricism come from descriptive secondary statistics and from qualitative interwievs with three inhabitants in Säffle, whom are experts which means they know the township of Säffle and it´s inhabitants well. Säffle has been studied from four perspectives, of which the first two have a top- or macroperspective. In the study appears two divergent pictures.

The purpose of this paper is to carry out a domain analysis of Section for Maps and Pictures at Uppsala University?s Library and investigate its business, collection and knowledge organization. Birger Hjørland?s socio-epistemological domain analytic paradigm is applied. As methods, Hjørland suggests eleven approaches, and from them he emphasizes especially the importance of the historical and epistemological approaches.In this paper three questions are analysed.

AbstractIn this study, the conceptions of a number of teachers in the Swedish primary and lower-secondary school about cultural pluralism, the values connected to this pluralism by the Curriculum for the Compulsory School System, the Pre-School Class and the Leisure-time Centre, Lpo 94, and the possibilities for pupils to gain knowledge about these values, were studied. The conceptions of the teachers were regarded and interpreted as ideology, since the study was made from a point of departure containing an assumption about how the content of the curriculum is of importance for the development of relations of power and dominance between different groups in society. The purpose of the study was to interpret the statements of a limited number of teachers about cultural pluralism, values and knowledge, regarding the ontological, axiological and epistemological assumptions and conceptions expressed therein. The empirical data of the study was gathered through qualitative interviews with eleven teachers working in six different primary and lower-secondary schools in the Mid-Sweden region. The conceptions expressed in the statements given by the respondents were categorized.

This essay is an introduction to the intentions and purposes of the british play writer Sarah Kane (1971-1999). Her own voice is presented both via quotations linked to her work and by an explanation of her connections to the surrealist poet and actor Antonin Artaud. The main focus is on Kane?s second play, Phaedra?s Love, first performed in 1996. The play is analyzed in co-relation to La volonté de savoir, the first volume in Michel Foucault?s trilogy Histoire de la sexualité.

The survey describes a number of risks that Swedish farming companies are exposed to. The risk areas covered by the survey are currency risks, price risks and financial risks. The survey further describes why these risks have a great impact on the future development of the farming companies. The survey highlights the interrelation between the risks and the measures which can be used to minimize the risks, so-called financial instruments. The aim of the survey is to put focus on above mentioned risks and describe how these risks can be reduced to prevent the Swedish farming industry from stagnating in the future. The survey is a secondary survey whereby existing knowledge about risks and risk management is applied to farming companies. The written information on price risks and hedging is primarily derived from foreign sources.

Studiens första syfte är att med institutionell teori kartlägga det kontraktsnät som konstituerar den europeiska marknaden för professionella herrgolfare. Det andra syftet är att analysera och diskutera vissa utvalda aspekter av detta kontraktsnät som utmärker Europatouren från traditionella vinstmaximerande företag. Den europeiska marknaden för proffsgolfare har organiserats i ett företag för att det är ekonomiskt fördelaktigt. Med Europatouren som en sammanhållande länk begränsas transaktionskostnaderna bl.a. genom att antalet kontraktsvägar reduceras och genom att utrymme för långsiktiga relationer med viktiga parter skapas.

Cataloguing electronic documents makes new demands on libraries. This thesis discusses the metadata formats Dublin Core and MARC which are, individually or in combination, commonly used for object description in the digital library.The formats are studied with particular emphasis on characteristics such as underlying reasoning (ambitions during the development of the formats), flexibility (possibilities of expansion and adaption to new demands) and interoperability (cooperation between different metadata formats). The formats are dealt with in their context, i.e. we discuss what types of documents the formats are meant to describe, what environment they were originally created for, what functions they are meant to fill (to find, identify, select and acquire/obtain entities), and also how these factors are related. The Swedish projects SAFARI (which uses Dublin Core) and NetSök (which uses MARC) are presented briefly.

This essay concerns equality statistics as part of a population census. It is a kind ofstatistics that is not in action in Sweden because of data protection law for sensitivedata (Personuppgiftslagen). This kind of an enlarged census is requested frominternational institutions like the UN and the EU as a tool to combat discriminationand to keep track of human rights. In Sweden there is a prohibition against collectingsensitive data regarding for instance sexuality, disability, transgender, ethnicbackground and national minority.The essay examines arguments from minority groups in Sweden, who participated inan enquiry done by the Equality Ombudsman on a government assignment 2011. Theenquiry process was done during 2012 and resulted in the report Statistikens roll iarbetet mot diskriminering (The Role of Statistics in Combating Discrimination).The starting point of the essay is to look at equality statistics with a two foldedpotential: as liberating or oppressive for the counted.

One could argue that the most discussed topic in finance is whether or not it is possible to ?beat the market?. Even though many people claim to do this, there is little evidence to support the idea that one can consistently beat the market over a long period of time. There are indeed several examples of investors who have managed to outperform the market consistently for a long time, but the efforts of these individuals or institutions could by many be considered to be pure luck.One of the many strategies that have been evaluated by several researchers and is said to generate a risk adjusted return greater than that of the market, is one based on the P/E-effect. This strategy is based on the financial ratio P/E ? price divided by earnings ? and used by constructing portfolios consisting of stocks with low P/E ratios.

In this study a case study was conducted at the Transport Agency. The government agency is seeking better alternatives to its current ways of keeping track of important dates stated in legal documents. The agency wants to explore the possibility for an IT-solution for keeping track on those dates. In the case study change analysis was conducted on the vehicle type approval process. Qualitative interviews were conducted with a section manager, vehicle type and component approvers, and with a system administrator and a system manager at the Transport Agency in Borlänge.

This study has been carried out as a part of the EC funded project, SMARTDOC IST-2000-28137, with the objective of developing application components that provide highly interactive visualization and collaboration functionalities. The low-level components from the graphics library AVS OpenViz 2.0 are used as the development basis. The application components can be inserted into electronic documents that allow embedded controls such as web documents or Microsoft Word or PowerPoint documents. Instead of displaying results as static images, a SMARTDOC component provides the ability to visualize data and interact with it inside the document. Although the principal goal of the SMARTDOC project is to create components in a number of different application domains this study concentrates on developing a medical imaging application component in collaboration with the project partners AETmed and professor Alan Jackson at the University of Manchester.