This master?s thesis aims to study the practice of separating popular genres of fiction from the rest of the fiction stock, often seen at public libraries. The method being used is critical discourse analysis according to Norman Fairclough?s three-dimensional conception of discourse. The textual dimension of this analysis is the book shelf itself and the sociocultural practice is the everyday practice at a public library of supplying and mediating books to the visitors.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how the public libraries work towards SFI (Swedish For Immigrants) based on the views of the overseeing librarians. To study this we have asked the following research questions:What distinguishes the public libraries? work towards SFI according to the responsible librarians? What distinguishes the communication between SFI teachers and the librarians according to the responsible librarians? What opinions are held by the librarians in regards to their work with SFI?We have used a semi structured interview method with seven librarians in charge of the activities with SFI at small and medium sized public libraries in a rural area of Sweden. The theoretical framework is composed of Marianne Andersson and Dorte Skot-Hansen?s model for analysis of the local public library profile and the authors? definition of collaboration.

The technical evolution has a great influence on the public libraries. Electronic media becomes more and more common. This Master´s thesis is based upon the Swedish Library law 9§ (SFS 1996:1596) which says: Public- and school libraries should pay special attention to children and teenagers by offering books, information technology and other media, adapted to their needs, to encourage development of language and stimulate reading. From this point of view we have examined why the children´s departments in public libraries offer CD-ROM games which are based upon characters from the literature, how they are used in the daily activity and how they can contribute to the development of the children´s department.We have made literary studies and empirical investigations including interviews, observation studies etc. The results from this studies shows that both young and adults appreciate the CD-ROM games.

The aim of this study is to examine Swedish public libraries preservation of rare book collections. In this study a rare book is rare when it become over a hundred years. I will investigate if libraries have any written policies or plans when it comes to preservation and also what the librarians? opinion about rare book collections are. This is of interest because public libraries have a lack of responsibility when it comes to preservation.

The purpose of this master's thesis is to describe the expansion of Sundbyberg public library during the decade 1954 to 1964. Our focus of interest is the library?s concentration on public relations in 1954.During the experimental year 1954 a public relations librarian, Bianca Bianchini, was employed. Her task was to introduce thelibrary to the citizens of Sundyberg who were not already using it. As a background to this concentration on public relations we also describe the early development of the public library in Sundbyberg.

Our thesis is an analysis of four librarians view on LGBTQ and which implications these views have on the practical work with LGBTQ issues in the public library. The three ideal types we can identify are the excluding, the including, and the normcritical approach. We also want to know if the four librarians? standpoints can be connected to the above mentioned ideal types. We can see that the area where the implementations of the three ideal types are most visible is the way LGBTQ material is displayed in the library space.

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 purpose of this study is to carry out a follow-up study of the reading stimulating project Arts in Reading. The project was in progress between the years 2007 to 2009 in Sweden and nearly 80 librarians from 57 public libraries participated. The aim of the project was to initiate new methods fot how to stimulate reading for children. The promoters of the project wanted to initiate the use of new art forms in the work for reading promotion, encourage more collaboration with new actors in the culture area, and co-operate more with the children.The aim of the present study is to investigate to which extent Arts in Reading really succeeded in establishing its goals, whether new methods were brought about, and how this work was done. Another aim is to find out how librarians in public libraries work to develop children's reading.The theoretical framework is based on Ragnhild Söderbergh's term inculturation, Elisabeth Björklund's research on how children acquire literacy, and Lev S.

The web sites of libraries are to a large extent their public face and to help market their services, the web sites must have interesting and regularly renewed content. They must also be visually attractive and easily used, and thus be well structured and have a well functioning navigational system. The web masters' awareness of the ability of web sites to attract users to the site and also to the library, as well as their knowledge of suitable content and site construction, is crucial for how successful the web site actually is at marketing the library. The research question is: How do the studied web sites function as marketing sources and service providers for the libraries, and are the web masters aware of the importance of the web site? The purpose is to investigate how the library personnel looks upon the web site as a possible way to increase the popularity of the library among the public, and to study the construction and content of the library web sites to find out how well these serve their purpose.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate and increase the understanding of a present function of today´s public library, namely the function of meeting place; here called the social function or social space. Two small town libraries are included in the study, and the questions examined are:How is this function described at the two libraries and what similarities and differences are there between the two? How can one describe the relation between how the library as social space is described in research and at the libraries? The theoretical framework used in examining these questions, consists of three different discourses in culture policy (the discourse of state, market and civil society) and theories on civil society and the public library. A summary of current research makes visible eight different aspects of the public library as a social space. These aspects functions as parts of the theoretical framework as well.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate what chief librarians in Sweden know about the present education in Library and Information Science and what opinions they have of it. We have used the following four questions as a starting point for our work: + How much do the chief librarians know about the education in Library and Information Science? + What are their opinions of the education? + What emphasis do they put on academic degrees and practical experience? + Are there any differences between various kinds of libraries regarding these issues? We decided to use questionnaires to gather our information. These were sent to 200 chief librarians on both public and research libraries all over Sweden. 151 of the questionnaires were answered.

We believed that knowledge organisation of manga and manhwa with homosexual (including lesbian) themes might be a challenge for Swedish public libraries. One of the reasons for this is that these themes in manga and manhwa usually occur in genres not directed towards an LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) audience. To see how Swedish public libraries treat such titles and why they treat them as they do, we examined a selection of public libraries, their collections, acquisitions, cataloguing and shelving of relevant titles. The theory used is mainly Grant Campbell?s binarisms, subject access to LGBTQ literature and critical analysis of knowledge organisation.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to investigate the role of link collections in Swedish public libraries mediation of Internet resources. The study is focusing on the effects on the contents and the structure in the link collections when the target group is immigrant users. This is done through literature studies completed with an examination of two link collections containing multi-cultural and multi-lingual material and qualitative interviews with the two librarians who are in charge of the collections. The major questions raised in this study are: What function do the link collections have for the public libraries? What is the difference in working with traditional, printed material compared to the work with Internet resources? And how are the selection of Internet resources and the structure of the link collections affected when the collection is intended for immigrant users? The main results are that link collections in public libraries can give a concrete form to political guidelines.

The aim of this bachelor thesis is to investigate the lending of video games at the public libraries in Sweden. The thesis focused around a web survey, which was sent out to all public library directors, as its research material. The results were compared with those found in a master thesis by Olle Berg and Thomas Nyström from 2008. This was done to gain a better understanding of why the libraries provided video games. The other results of the survey were analyzed with a quantitative method.The results indicate that half of the responding libraries provide video games for borrowing.

The Swedish public library was founded in the years when the society in Sweden went from being a society of agriculture to industrialism. Modernism was sweeping over the country, everything was possible, which influenced the new society that was built. Now Sweden was going to be a true democracy with responsible and empathic citizens. One of the main tools in this process was to educate people, to get them to read and write and the public library fitted very well into these new ideas. It represented a place, free of charge, where everyone could go to take part of the knowledge and cultural learning that they needed in order to become the citizen that the society required.