This master?s thesis deals with the issue of children?s theatre at the public library. I want to examine what purpose children?s theatre play for the children according to the children?s librarians, what different factors that may influence the purchase of plays to the public library and what the children?s librarians think of the children?s theatre at the public library at present and in the future. Interviews have been conducted with four children?s librarians, at different libraries, who are somehow involved in the purchase of children?s plays to the library.

The purpose of this master thesis is both to interpret the articles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child from a public library point of view and to investigate how childrens librarians in the county of Norrbotten view their working situation in their relation to the users. This purpose leads to the main question: How do the childrens librarians and the childrens library consultant describe the present and the future of the childrens library activities in the sparsely populated regions in the county of Norrbotten? The subquestions are: What articles from the Childrens Rights Convention are the most relevant for the public library? In what way can you notice the Childrens Rights in the way the childrens librarians work towards the users? What part of the childrens library activity is the most important according to the childrens librarians and the childrens library consultant? The thesis is based on qualitative interviews with childrens librarians and the childrens library consultant of Norrbotten and field observations. The result of the study shows that the articles we found most relevant for the public library are 2, 3, 6, 12, 13, 14, 17, 23, 28/29, 30, 31 and 42. The Childrens Rights can be noticed in several ways in the childrens library activities.

The main purpose of this thesis is to investigate how the societysystem in Austria has influenced the library system. The aim is toanalyse in what way these influences have changed during thegrowth and development of the public library system and how it isdisplayed in each separate library branch. The focus of myinvestigation has been the municipality public libraries in Vienna,and mainly the three libraries in the third district of the city. Themethod I have used is literature studies, examining and analysingsource material from the internal archive of the public libraries inVienna. I have also used the qualitative interview method in orderto examine the situation in the selected libraries Rabengasse,Erdbergstraße and Fasangasse.As there is no common library law, there are significantdifferences in the library structure in different parts of Austria andeach municipality decides how they want to prioritize the libraries.Since the public libraries of Vienna are well organized together inBüchereien Wien, the library structure in the separate librarybranches is coordinated.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to analyse how adult students in Swedish adult education seek information for school tasks. The focus is on how they use the public library and electronic information sources and their reflection on information and sources in this process. Also of interest in the study is the help they receive from staff in the public library and their teacher. Methods used in collecting and analysing data for this study were of qualitative nature.

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.

The focus of this two year's master thesis is on participation of children at the TioTretton Library, a library strictly for 10-13 year olds. No adults, except the library staff are allowed in this library. To build on this aim the objectives of this thesis is centred on the questions:How does the library staff view their specific library's mission? What are the conditions for children's participation at TioTretton Library? Based on the relevant theory of participation, how participatory are the children in the library's activities? What significance has TioTretton Library's work with children participation for the children's ability to empowerment?The theoretical framework is mainly centred upon the Ladder of Participation designed by R. A.

The purpose of this master thesis is to investigate how the public library can support adult learning through collaboration with other actors in the community. This is done by examining the activity of Linköping municipal library towards the user group adult students. The questions raised consider; the political view of supporting adult learning, the role of the public library, who are the actors in Linköping, the experiences of collaboration and finally what promotes and restrains collaboration. The investigation is done as a case study with qualitative methods. The qualitative methods was found to be the most appropriate for this study, since the majority of the empirical material has been collected through interviews.

This Master?s thesis concerns the public librarian?s professional identity. The complexity of the mandates of the public librarian, and the public library, raises questions on how librarians understand their professional identities. The empirical material consists of qualitative in-depth interviews with librarians. Two theoretical approaches are used in the analysis of the material with a focus on the public librarians? knowledge and professional role.

This Masters thesis aims at presenting a picture of, and critically examining, the Swedish debate concerning the public library and the future by way of 21 articles in three library periodicals. The questions examined are: -What are the views concerning the future public library in Swedish library press? -What characterizes the debate and why? Theories on political institutions and information society are used and the method is hermeneutic, a type of idea-analysis. The first step in the analysis consists of a categorized presentation of the material. The themes concern the form and content of the library as well as competence and hopes/fears.

The aim of this Master's thesis is to discuss and analyse co-operation between public and academic libraries. The political changes that were initiated during 2004 have come to alter the conditions for Swedish libraries. The Swedish library law was changed at the 1st of January 2005 and co-operation between libraries is now statuary even if there is no description of how the new mission is to be executed. At the same time an extensive report about the Royal Library and its role as the Swedish National Library was presented. This report also recommended an increased co-operation between different types of libraries.

The point of departure for this thesis was an article written by Christer Hermansson (2008). He thinks that librarians, following the development of Library 2.0 and the change of public libraries, have strayed away from what he believes should be the focus of the library: Literature. The aim of this thesis is to study how librarians in six Swedish libraries perceive their occupational roles. How does the increased user control, which is seen as part of Library 2.0, affect the tasks of libraries and librarians? The material used in this study was acquired using a qualitative interview technique in which six librarians working in public libraries with experience of IT, mediation and purchase of literature partook.

Libraries all over the world struggle against the threat of decreased funding and a lack of governmental interest. In countries with an under-developed library sector the interest from the government is often minimal or non-existent. Since the 80´s Sida, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency has contributed to the library development in Central America through the Royal Library of Sweden. Nicaragua was the first country to be counterpart in the project. For a period of eight weeks I have completed a field study in Nicaragua and visited the National Library Rubén Darío and public libraries in the country.

This master thesis aims to examine how public libraries in Sweden are practically and ideologically equipped to deal with e-books, outside of the dominant distributor Elib. The study also aims to find out what?s required of the book market and the public libraries to make further progress in the question of e-books. In Sweden e-books are still representing only a small amount of all the library loans and an even smaller amount of the commercial book market.The methodological and theoretical ground for the thesis is Grounded Theory, and the survey is based on interviews with publishers, librarians and distributors.The conclusions of this thesis are that the public libraries lack resources to invest in e-books, and that they also lack in knowledge about the media and its readers. It also exposes that both internal and external collaboration efforts need to be further developed.

The aim of this study is to investigate the needs and wishes of 10-13- year old children, so called tweens, when it comes to their local library. What kind of library do the children want? How does the mission and different functions for the children's library of today correspond to the needs of the children? Children of this certain age have been interviewed in focus groups where they have had freedom to ?create? their own library and discuss what they consider important in a library. Skot- Hansen, Rasmussen & Jochumsen's model (2011) with four important spaces for a library - performative space, learning space, inspiration space and meeting space has been part of analyzing the result. These four different areas for the library have been divided into threefunctions: a place for being, a place for learning and a place for creating.The result of the thesis shows, among others, that even though many of the aims of the libraries and the results of research correspond to the ideas and needs of the children, one of the most important functions for the children is the library as a place to relax, a quiet room, where they can dive into their books and other media, which has not been discussed in the research I have taken part of.

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.