The purpose of this thesis is to examine how acquisition of film for children and young adults in public libraries is carried out. The aim is to investigate why the librarians think a library should have film, if the librarians are bound by acquisition policies and where they retrieve information about films. We also want to know where the films are bought, how the distributors are perceived and how the librarians see their own sphere of competence. The thesis is a qualitative study and is based on interviews with children?s librarians in six public libraries.

The purpose of this master's thesis is to examine children's communication and interaction during story time at the public library. The aim is also to examine how to develop the story time ? in terms of participation and equality ? at a specific library.Action research was used as a research strategy and participant observation, log, tutoring and interviews as methods to collect data. Since action research is done on the basis of practice, a significant collaboration with the librarian and the participant children is taking place within this study.Research from the fields of Library and Information Science, Education and Childhood Sociology form the interdisciplinary research area to which this study links. The theoretical framework consists of theory and concepts from the Socio-cultural Perspective, Poststrucuralist Feminism and Childhood Sociology.

The aim of this study is to look closer at collection development and the use of collection development policies in Swedish public libraries, with the help of a few examples. Through interviews with three librarians in three different public libraries and an analysis of these libraries? collection development policies, the authors try to find out how the creation of collection development policies takes place in these libraries, how these librarians use the policy, how these policies have been followed up and revised, and also to see what the policies of these libraries include. The material of the study suggests that a lot of work is required to write the policies, and that the written policy itself is seldom used by the librarians. The interviewed librarians still find the policies useful because the writing of them gave a detailed understanding of what the collection of the library contains.

The aim of this essay is to examine three separate Swedish public libraries and their respective websites on the grounds of the usability sciences. I firstly had to summarize the main properties of the usability-field in order to gain an extended knowledge of its purposes and possible usage for today?s library systems. I was then able to apply the extended knowledge in the examination of the three library websites and the purpose of determining whether or not they were designed according to the standards set by the usability-sciences.Usability is a rather new science that deals with the dissection and examination of computer-based systems, in order to find the key components that make systems user-friendlier. With user needs being the main focus of its research, usability tries to meet all the different needs of the modern user and construct systems that are less system-centered and more user-centered.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine the librarians? perception of the users of children?s and young people?s literature. Questions posed in this study are: How are the librarians described according to appearance, personality and interaction with the users? How are the librarians described compared to former studies on the subject? Which perception can be seen, based on Douglas Rabers?s theory which describes the role the public libraries can take in the society? The study is based on content analysis. We have examined 15 descriptions of librarians in both picture books and literature for young adults, published between 1985 and 2006.

The pupose of this study is to qualitatively study how teachers at a high school work with the schools demokratic mission under the management by objectives and what the policy document says and how the students can partcipate in different issues. My question fomulations are: What does it say in the governing documents about schools democratic mission and student influence? How do teachers concretely work to implement the values of democracy and student influence? How can the class councils used as part of the school's democratic mission? The theoretical frame of the study is about the school democracy mission and the possibilities and limits.  Futhermore a brief review of the fundamental values of the school are presented, followed by how the democratic process works.I used the qualitative analysis in order to find a lot of information about a small amount. Its strength is to convey a lot of information about a small number of observations and if the material is small in size.

This paper discusses normativity in selecting musical phonograms in public libraries. The purpose is to gain an increased understanding of music activity in public libraries. To do this I have interviewed five music librarians about their visions, ideals and goals with their work. The questions discussed concern ambitions with the music activity and how to keep up to date with current record releases. For the theoretical frame I use two kinds of material.

The purpose of this study is to examine and explain why three Swedish public libraries failedin their ambition to act as information services for small and medium-sized firms (SMF). To support this purpose two major assumptions are made:1) Public libraries who plan to run this kind of "business" must act with the same means as "professional" services.2) The service must be adjusted to the information needs of the customer.Based on these assumptions sixteen factors which are crucial to the "success" for this kind of service are presented.Applied to the information services of Lidkoping, Sölvesborg and Västervik, these factors reveal a number of shortcomings and mistakes made by the libraries.To understand this result these information services are seen as parts of a traditional Swedish public "library-thought". It is shown that, fundamental ideas in the way the public libraries are defined, like the responsibility to act in a neutral and democratic way, also characterised the three information services.These ideas together with the opinion of SMF as a "rational" information-consumer resulted in information services who did not meet the information-needs and information-behaviour of SMF..

The theme of this thesis is the professional ethics of public librarians. Qualitative interviews have been conducted with fourteen public librarians, with the aim to investigate their thoughts·and opinions concerning professional ethics and their experiences of ethical dilemmas in professional situations.The result shows that the majority of the librarians often discuss problems concerning what's right or wrong but that the discussions are conducted on the basis of practical situations and not in terms of professional ethics. The majority have vague ideas of how the term professional ethics should be applied on the work of public librarians, though all the interviewees consider the professional ethical discussion to be important.We examine the librarians opinions and experiences of ethical dilemmas conceming four subject areas: the principle of the librarian as a neutral and nonrestricting information intermediary, the principle of equal treatment of all the library visitors, difficulties. concerning media selection and the problems based upon the librarians flexibility towards the intemal rules of the library. The librarians experienced the behaviour towards the visitors as the greatest problem.

This study is about fourteen-year-old boys, who are not interested in reading. It deals with what thoughts and feelings some boys have around books, reading and libraries. Further the study investigates the boys' leisure activities and their making of identities. The study is built on interviews among twelve boys in a secondary school. The result is compared to earlier reports and research.

The purpose of this thesis is to study how children's librarians in public libraries use non-fiction books in their work to promote reading. My research questions are: What methods do children's librarians use för promoting non-fiction books? Are there children who can gain more from non-fiction books than other children do? Are there any differences in working with fiction and non-fiction books? To answer these questions I have interwieved five children's librarians about their methods, attitudes and thoughts on non-fiction books.The result shows that all of the librarians use non-fiction when it comes to promotion reading but not to the same extent. Some hardly use it at all, mainly because the schools that they are serving demands fiction books when practicing reading skills. while others use it but in less extent than fiction, as a way of separating the library reading from school work either because they want to keep the experience of reading in the library apart from school work or because they find it more efficient to do so.

The purpose of this Bachelor thesis is to examine how user-friendly the OPAC of the Märsta public library is considered to be.Theoretical basis are HCI and Allwoods definition of usability. Issues are: Is the OPAC suited to its task? Is the OPAC user-friendly? How well does a user accept the OPAC? and What degree of competence is shown by users of the OPAC? The source material consists of six interviews in the form of .avi files. The method I have chosen is qualitative semi-structured interview form. The result is that, based on Carl Martin Allwood?s defini-tion and with exception for the using of help-resources, the usability of Märsta?s library OPAC can be considered less good..

How do you summarize the content of a fictional work, let?s sayLord of the Rings, into a few "telling" words that may represent it? This master?s thesis is a comparative study of how library users? freely chosen tags/keywords deviate from controlled vocabulary made by professional indexers when representing fiction. The thesis answers four main questions:? Do the tags that the library users give fictional works correspond to the categories used in professional indexing in Sweden?? Do the tags follow the standards for vocabulary, semantics and syntax used when indexing professionally?? Do the tags add something to document representations?? Are there differences between the tags used for adult fiction and the tags used for children?s literature?With a starting point in indexing theories of Frederick W. Lancaster, Annelise Pejtersen, and the semiotic theory of the indexing process of Jens-Erik Mai, 383 tags from totally 70 fictional works are analyzed.

The aim of this essay is to examine three separate Swedish public libraries and their respective websites on the grounds of the usability sciences. I firstly had to summarize the main properties of the usability-field in order to gain an extended knowledge of its purposes and possible usage for today?s library systems. I was then able to apply the extended knowledge in the examination of the three library websites and the purpose of determining whether or not they were designed according to the standards set by the usability-sciences.Usability is a rather new science that deals with the dissection and examination of computer-based systems, in order to find the key components that make systems user-friendlier. With user needs being the main focus of its research, usability tries to meet all the different needs of the modern user and construct systems that are less system-centered and more user-centered.

This study investigates the use of the social network Facebook among 67 Swedish libraries; 27 academic libraries and 40 public libraries. Data is collected through an analysis of the libraries? Facebook pages and through an email survey. To analyze the data, a series of statistical analyses were performed.The results indicate that the public libraries more actively posted Facebook updates than the academic libraries and that the libraries that had a policy for use of Facebook/social media more actively posted updates than those libraries that did not have such policy. The libraries use Facebook mainly to post links and photos and to announce events, provide book recommendations, and to emphasize special occasions.