The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to investigate the library needs of fourteen-to-fifteen-year-olds. We have limited the investigation to the significance of libraries for the teenagers in their leisure time. Our focus is the public library with a particular reference to the plans for a new local public library with a youth profile in Malmö. With a departure point in the idea that young people?s use and view of libraries is to a large extent depending on factors such as social and cultural background and lifestyle, we chose to do a qualitative interview study with eight teenagers.

This Master thesis focuses on change conditions and change ambitions in Swedish public libraries. I have chosen to focus on three libraries that participated in a much-debated developmental project sponsored by the Swedish Arts Council almost twenty years ago. The aim of the project was to enhance service-quality, increase user-influence over media acquisition and library routines, and to redefine the concept of quality in the library context. I have made comparisons of the conditions and change ambitions between the project period 1991-1994 and present day 2009. To do this I have analyzed the evaluations of the above-mentioned project and the developmental plans that every municipality in Sweden is required to write according the library-law of 2004.

This two year masters thesis is written in the scientific field of library- and information science. The purpose of the study is to investigate the collaboration between teachers and librarians in different types of school library organisations. Two school libraries with only the school as a target group, two integrated public- and school libraries, one school library division and one public library that provides the school with school library services has been studied. The study takes place in Uppland.The theoretical framework used is based on Montiel-Overall and her four models of collaboration: coordina-tion, cooperation, integrated instruction and integrated curriculum. The first research question focuses on the col-laboration between teachers and librarians based on each of the TLC-models.

The aim of this Master thesis was to examine how libraries at Swedish colleges and universities make Open Access journals in physics available to users. We examined if, where, and how the 50 Open Access journals that are listed in the Directory of Open Access (DOAJ) under the heading Physics (General) were made available to the public at 19 Swedish colleges and universities. We also examined possible patterns regarding qualities in the Open Access journals and to what extent the libraries made them available. For this descriptive statistic was used. The selection of library portals that were included in the study were those Swedish colleges and universities that teach physics.

The aim of this master?s thesis is to investigate the value and impact that reading groups organized by Swedish Public Libraries, have on its participants, role of the librarian and the Library as whole, according to librarian?s conceptions. In literature and earlier research reading groups are described to represent an important reader pro-motion tool for Public Libraries. At the same time the typical reading group member is often described as a per-son with a familiarity of reading. Another purpose is therefore to investigate the contribution of reading groups in promoting reading, according to librarian?s conceptions.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine librarians opinions about media. Four questions are asked: What kind of different attitudes to new media has librarians had? How is new media discussed in relationship to each other in the debate? What mechanisms and underlying causes control the discourse for new media in public libraries? Does the discourse change over time, in that case, how? The theoretical background is theory about moral- and media panic and popular adult education. The media panic theory includes the idea that the same reaction occurs every time a new media is introduced. The theory about popular adult education is that the public need to be cultivated.

This study examines the closure of public libraries, and the nonprofit organizations takeover of them as a phenomenon. The aim is to understand why the nonprofit takeover is common and what the takeover symbolizes and if the discourse in media invokes the views on libraries and the profession.Interviews were made with librarians, politicians and representatives of a nonprofit organization to study different sides of the phenomenon. Other empirical data were found in local and national newspapers and media-channels. I discovered that public libraries are highly valued by both politicians and the community. The study also showed that a library in a community makes people feel valued.

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 our research was to examine whether the acceptance and diffusion of RFID technology among the employees at public libraries in Sweden, follow the classic diffusion of innovation model. RFID or Radio Frequency Identification, is a technology that uses radio frequency and microchip technology to track items, in our case, library books and other library materials. Diffusion is the process by which, in our case, the RFID technology is adopted by the library staff. The purpose of this study was to examine what factors influenced the acceptance and adoption of RFID among the library staff. We used Everett Rogers' Diffusion of innovation theory as our framework.

In 1911 Valfrid Palmgren founded the Children's Library of Stockholm, the very first in Sweden.She was a well-educated woman, who believed in social and educational equality for all.During a journey to the USA in 1907, she was deeply impressed by the public libraries, andshe put many of the public library ideas to use in the Children's Library of Stockholm. Palmgrenstrongly opposed to the Swedish libraries not allowing admission to children, since shefirmly believed that educating the people had to start with the children.Other reasons for opening a children's library were to give children an alternative to roamingthe streets, to give children a quiet place to read, to give an alternative to the cheap trashliterature that flooded the market and to teach the young ones how to extract information frombooks. Of great importance was that the library should be equal to all classes in society.In 1927 the children's library was taken over by the new public library of Stockholm..

The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to accomplish an understanding for how librarians purchase fiction literature in public libraries. To answer these questions, we have performed four qualitative interviews with librarians in three Swedish municipalities. We have also performed a smaller document study to give us an overview of the used guidelines at the selected libraries. The results of our survey have been analyzed on the basis of our revised version of Sanna Talja?s model The Interpretative Repertoires of the Music Library.

This bachelor's thesis is an investigation into the public libraries'actions following the debate of Stina Wirséns character LillaHjärtat, featured in picture books and films for young children.The character was accused of being racist, due to its similarity tostereotypes such as pickaninnies. Because of this, the books'existence in public libraries was questioned.The purpose of this study is to investigate how librarians havedealt with these books, and what they have based their decisionson. To explore the background of these decisions we have usedPatrick Wilson's theory of cognitive authority (1983). We haveexamined which cognitive authorities have been used in thedecision-making process of how to handle the books containingLilla Hjärtat, and why these cognitive authorities have beenchosen. The method used in the study is qualitative interviewswith seven librarians working in public libraries throughoutSweden.The results of the interviews show that the librarians? mostprominent cognitive authorities have been authors and illustratorsof children's books.

The aim of this MA thesis is to examine how users regard and receive the services offered by a specific public library. We also examine what the conception of service means to the users and how they perceive this service being offered by the library. We look upon if and to what extent the service conception depends on contact with the library staff. The methods used are qualitative interviews and analyses of documents directing the library activities. The public library we have examined in this respect is the public library of Västerås.

Mediation of fiction for adult users in Swedish public libraries is a subject which has been little studied from a theoretical perspective. The motivation for this thesis was based on this realization, and the opinion that actual library users too seldom get their voices heard in library and information science-research. The thesis analyzes interviews with seven library users in which they have been asked to talk about the librarys work with mediating fiction. The answers are analyzed using a discourse analytic approach to see how the librarys work with mediating fiction is constructed in the users talk.Two main discourses are identified, one authoritative and one neutral. In the authoritative discourse librarians are talked of as experts who have the knowledge to guide users to the ?right? literature.

The purpose with this study is to examine what kind of support there is for school libraries at the selected independent upper secondary schools and how these schools ensure that libraryservices is available to their students and their teachers. The purpose is also to examine what attitudes the administrators of the schools have to school libraries and teaching in information seeking. A qualitative method with interviews was used to fulfil the purpose. As a theoretical basis of the study Loertschers taxonomies of the school library media program and Limbergs three levels of pedagogic research were used and the interviews were analysed with these two theoretical frameworks as a background. The result of the study showed that neither one of the three examinated schools has a school library which means that they use the public library instead.