The purpose of this paper is to investigate in which aspects the public library is affected by its local community. This is re-searched by means of an exemplified case study of a Swedish public library in which we analyze governing documents and the library website with respect to environmental scanning and mar-keting of library services.The research questions are: How are the local community?s demands on the public li-brary being described in the governing document? How is the public library?s response to the demands of the local community being described in the operational plan? How are the demands of the local community, as shown in the governing document and the operational plan, re-flected in the marketing of library services on the library website?Our conclusions are that:The demands of the local community are described in a general fashion in the governing document, but there is a lack of concrete political guidelines.The public library's response to the demands of the local commu-nity is described to some length in the operational plan, but not with respect to economical factors.The demands of the local community are reflected to some length in the marketing of library services on the library website. Many of the overall themes that we identify in the governing document and the operational plan can be found in the marketing directed towards important target groups..

The purpose of this study was to illustrate how children of the "digital generation" used their computers in their everyday practice. The important in the study was children's perspective on computers interactions and communications in a digital arena.An essential item about understanding children's way to think about computers was to let children themselves speak by taking part in the study, because children's voices are seldom heard in public. The empirical material used was interviews with sex children between 13 and 15 years old. My method was qualitative.The main results showed that social relations are very important for children. The Internet gives children access to an arena where they are able to make new contacts with others as well as transcend their biological as their physical identity.An important accepts for the children in the study was the option to be anonymous.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore what possibilities Swedish public library has to work with and promote integration. The possibilities are examined on the basis of internal requirements of integration, the role of public library in the civil society and its policy documents. Further, the thesis examines what Swedish National library politics could contribute to this particular field. The experience of integration politics shows that a genuine commitment from all parts of the society is required in order to build an integrated society. The part of a society that public libraries are closest to and have the greatest impact on is undoubtedly the civil society.

We are daily using the public space to move throughout the city. The public space is an important part of our city and it?s where a lot of social activities occur and a lot of different events take place. The outdoor environment in the city should offer the residents nice and varying places for staying. In this essay I will try to understand how the physical environment works and how people moves and behave in the public space.

The aim of this study is to look at censorship and attempted censorship of books about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual (GLBT) people in public libraries in the USA. People from the public can submit formal challenges to a book at the library when they find the material offensive which can lead to those books being taken away from the library shelves. The questions asked are why GLBT- literature is being challenged, and sometimes banned, and how do the libraries deal with the challenges to the books.It is nowadays the people from the public, rather than the government or the librarians that are behind many cases of removal of books with homosexual themes. The study presents some of the fictional GLBT- literature that has been cause for much controversy in the USA. All the five examples mentioned are children?s books concerning GLBT- themes and are among the most challenged books in American libraries in the past twenty years.

This thesis investigates how energy is used in three public baths today and suggests measures that could reduce the energy demand. The results show that there is a great poteltial for energy savings i public baths, and that it would be interesting to examine some of the proposed measures further..

In this thesis I discuss and analyse the relationship between USA and Europe since the end of the Cold War. Many authors claimed that the Soviet threat was the glue that kept the continents together. Now that threat is gone and new challenges have risen. In what way has this relationship been influenced by the new challenges this new era stands for? By doing a case study and by using two quite different theorists, John Mearsheimer an offensive realist and Joseph Nye who is a liberal institutionalist, I?ll try to show how for example September 11, anti-amerikanism and NATO can be explained and understood.

The aim of this issue is to study how Swedish public libraries deal with the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of information in connection with public use of the Internet. The authors intention has been to find out whether the public use of the Internet has caused ethical problems for library workers and how the libraries solve situations when they consider their principles violated by library users. The authors study the debate on the issue in a couple of Swedish library magazines published during the late 1990s and they also give a few examples from the USA during the same period. They study the ethical principles and directives for schools published by the Swedish Board of Education as they claim that many of the public library users are students who bring along their ethical conceptions and thereby affect the ethical climate of the libraries. In their study the authors refer to ethical rules given to librarians by their trade union DIK and to the conclusions drawn from the hearing Good Ethics on the Net held by the Swedish IT Commission in 1998.

This report is written in cooperation with Eskilstuna municipality public administration for urban planning. The reports purpose is to look into how other public authorities carry out public purchase of consultants and entrepreneurs in the urban planning area. The goal is to come up with suggestions of how Eskilstuna municipality public administration for urban planning can improve its purchasing process in this field in order to minimize the risk where a consultant or entrepreneur files an appeal against the decision of awarding a contract to another rival. The appeal can be filed to the county administrative court.The public administration for urban planning can do its purchases through the model of "lowest price" or "economically most favorable" for them. When using "economically most favorable", the department can value a number of soft parameters by giving them points and the offer which gets most points can be rewarded the right to sign a contract.

The purpose of this Master thesis is to examine whether the term elasticity is relevant and functional to apply to public library organisations. Another aim of the thesis is to relate the term elasticity to public library organisations in a network society. Sociologist Manuel Castells provide the theoretical framework on the network society. Three investigations (meant to complement each other) in two Swedish public libraries seek to give answers to these questions.To be able to examine which areas of public library activity are elastic, I make a rough definition of what public library organisations consist of ? nine activity fields are identified using IFLA?s guidelines in combination with Swedish law of public libraries.

The purpose of this essay is to explore the actor network of a high technology company in the textile industry called F.O.V. Fabrics. The background for doing this is a recent project, which we choose to call the Salt & Paper Battery Group, aiming to commercialize a newly discovered technology ? a battery based on cellulose from an alga. We start by examining a range of network theories in order to eventually shape a framework of our own.

The public libraries were quick to adapt to the changes that the Internet brought on, and today library websites are an important part of the public library. To meet the needs of teens today, the library website could offer a range of contents to make it an attractive place on many levels; both the academic needs as well as social and recreational needs should be addressed.The aim of this thesis is to evaluate public library websites for teenagers in Sweden, and to examine how well the websites address the developmental tasks and needs that teenagers have. The method used is website evaluation, one quantitative and one qualitative. A total of 60 public library sites for teenagers were evaluated, using 11 criteria based on Havighursts developmental tasks. The quantitative evaluation measured how many functions each website had per criteria, and showed that the majority of the sites had one or two functions for most of the criteria.

The aim of this master´s thesis is to explore how Stockholms new library´s identity is constructed, and further to relate the case study to a general discussion of the identity of public libraries in Sweden. This is done through analysis of the visions and plans that the planned library is based on. We feel that it is a relevant study since questions concerning the public library's identity are for library and information science as well as the institution. Questions posed in the study are: How is the roles and identity of the planned library described in the texts that form the basis of the project? What characterises the relationship between the present and the planned library? What discourses concerning the public library's identity can we see in the material?The theoretical framework of the thesis is a discourse oriented analysis based on the critical discourse analysis of Norman Fairclough.

From a time where employees often remained at one company until retirement, globalization and changed employment patterns have created a more mobile labor market in the last years. In an effort to expand the connection between organization and employee a rising interest in corporate alumni networks has emerged. Previous research has shown that conditions for such networks are formed through employees social identification, perceived organizational support and organizational citizenship and can be shaped by company's HR practices.This paper aims to examine two case companies' perceived benefits through alumni relations as well as their HR prac-tices, in order to increase understanding surrounding the relationship between the two areas. Further the study intends to draw conclusions about the role of corporate alumni networks in the creation of the received benefits.The study indicates that HR practices, through the creation of an organizational citizenship behavior, can influence the conditions for beneficial alumni relations. Results show that some expected benefits of alumni relations can be re-ceived through strong citizenship.

The purpose of this thesis is to describe and to increase the understanding of the negotiation process between the public- and the private sector in a Public-Private Partnership (PPP). I have chosen to explore the first ?real? PPP project in Denmark, the construction of Vildbjerg compulsory school in the municipality of Trehøje.This case study is based upon a qualitative method consisting of interviews with the leading negotiators from both sectors. Two different theoretical perspectives are used to construct the basis of the analysis - The Theory of Public-Private Partnership and Negotiation theory - and serve as a concept instrument.The result of the analysis indicates that the negotiators from the different sectors have problems to get out of their traditional roles as purchaser and contractor ? in PPP they should act like partners.