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The aim of this master thesis has been to investigate discussions about public access to Internet in public libraries. Areas of interest were the debate in Sweden as well as in the United States. The approach was qualitative and questionnaires were distributed by e-mail to a number of Swedish public libraries. The results from the survey were then supplemented with a theoretical background and a literature study. The usable questionnaires obtained from 20 libraries showed a rather uniform approach among the Swedish librarians of how the Internet is best provided by public libraries.

Public procurement in Sweden is regulated by the Act on Public Procure­ment (lagen om offentlig upphandling, LOU, in Swedish). The Public procurement in Sweden stands every year approximately for 500 bil­lion Swedish crowns of the taxpayers? money. It is therefore im­portant that the money is spent in the best possible way. The focus in this study is set on the relationship between the small- and medium sized building entrepreneurs and the government.

The aim of this Master´s thesis is to examine how public library managers reflect on readers´ advisory and promotion of adult literature, and how they view and discuss the governmental proposition Läsa för livet (prop. 2013/14:3). Questions posed in this study are: What matters do public library managers think fiction have on adults? How do public library managers reflect on promotion of adult literature? What are public library managers´ views on the governmental proposition Läsa för livet and how it will affect the public library?The theoretical starting-points used in this study are views on literature by Magnus Persson and Gitte Balling, and views on literature promotion by Rasmus Grøn. Method chosen was semi-structured interviews with six library managers in public libraries.

The aim of this bachelor thesis is to describe in part the public library users?process when deciding which books to borrow. Focus is on the library users?experience of the process and how literature exposure can support them intheir choice of book. This study seeks to find out to what extent choices arespontaneously made at the library, which elements of exposure that the userfinds helpful in the process and which factors usually influence the user infinding new things to read.The data was gathered through 100 structured interviews with public libraryusers.

This Master's thesis concerns the public library as a public meeting place. Our aim has been to find out why and how the library as a social meeting place has been discussed within the Swedish library community and if there has been a constant core in the discussions from the mid 70's and up to the present day. In order to do this we apply a place and space-perspective. The result of the study is that the core of the said discussions concerning the library as a meeting place is to create belongingness. This is the reason why the library community has an interest in the public library's function as a meeting place with the idea that people, by using the public library in that aspect, may experience a feeling of belonging to the society.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to investigate how the image of the Public library is described in the Swedish national library politics, and compare it with the image given of the public library in the Danish national library politics. The method used for this analysis is a comparative discourse analysis of the homepages produced by the Swedish central government Regeringen and Kulturrådet and its Danish counterpart Kulturministeriet and Biblioteksstyrelsen. Theories on postmodernity have been used to analyze how the Swedish and the Danish central governments image of the Public library corresponds with a changing society and the changing behaviour of the public library users. Our analysis concludes that the traditional view of the Public library as an institution mainly concerned with literature and reading still is of great significance in the discourse of the Swedish central government. In contrast, the Danish central government presents a more postmodern view of the public library as an institution that is part of the Information- and the Knowledge society.

The Swedish Public Relation industry has gone through a rapid growth in the recent decade. A peculiar, although perhaps not unexpected, development is that former politicians and politically employed individuals to a larger extent have been the subject of recruitment effort from the industry. Simultaneously there has been a public debate concerning the influence on Public Relations and Lobbying over the political agenda. The purpose of this thesis is to widen and deepen the discussion concerning Public Relations consultants. It centers on the individual consultants and takes their competence as the point of departure.

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.

The aim of this study was to investigate how selected municipalities? use social media, with a focus on how they are working to increase the dialogue between municipalities? and residents. To answer the purpose of the study three questions has been formulated: how do the communicators use social media in their daily work? What opportunities and challenges are the municipalities? experiencing with Facebook? How do they work with Facebook to increase dialogue with citizens?The theories that has been used in this study is Cutlip?s and Grunig?s public relations theories, Shannon and weavers communication model, Cutlip?s and Heath?s theory of issue management and Jenkins theory of convergence culture. The method that has been used in this study is qualitative semi-structured interviews and the analysis is done with a thematic text analysis.

UN is a non-governmental organization which should promote gender equality within the organization. It is an organization which is based on human rights and claims that in order to solve the problem of poverty, famine and development we need to promote women?s status. In Sweden there is a strong tradition of gender balanced representation at the governmental level and this perspective raise the question if there is a spill-over effect to the civil society as in the case of a non-governmental organization. This makes it interesting to look at if a non-governmental organization which is not under state control work for gender equality within their own organization.

In 2005 a public housing company in Uppsala, Sweden introduced the service quarter host. The focus on comfort (life quality in American programmes) is similar to the non-tolerance programmes. The idea of non-tolerance derived from the theory of Broken windows. The purpose is to examine how the service works according to the theories of Broken windows and social control. The aim is also to examine if the manifest and the latent functions are the same in different areas.

In 2005 a public housing company in Uppsala, Sweden introduced the service quarter host. The focus on comfort (life quality in American programmes) is similar to the non-tolerance programmes. The idea of non-tolerance derived from the theory of Broken windows. The purpose is to examine how the service works according to the theories of Broken windows and social control. The aim is also to examine if the manifest and the latent functions are the same in different areas.

Internet access has been a part of the range in public libraries for approximately a decade. The Swedish municipals, in charge of the public libraries, and the libraries themselves, have a great deal of saying in how they should be run, what to offer the public, how many hours they have to stay open etcetera. The Library law is very vague on many things, including public Internet access. Even though Sweden is ranked as first runner up worldwide when it comes to Internet penetration among the population (Internet World Stats 2007), approximately twenty percent in the 16-74 age group does not have Internet access at home, at work or at school (SCB 2006a). In this master thesis we try to determine, through personal interviews, how six of those in charge feel about Internet at their libraries, all located in medium-sized municipals (20 000 ? 40 000 inhabitants), why they have chosen the rules and regulations they have and their thoughts about what they consider to be the most important assignment of public libraries.

The purpose with this work is to describe the language that is built around the chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) in Sweden. Our questions are: What does the professional field look like; who writes, about what and for which kind of readers? How do they describe the expressions and the upcoming of CFS? For which reasons can CFS be considered as a medical diagnosis/illness? How can CFS be understood from a social perspective? Our theoretical starting point is a social constructive theory and also Karin Johannisson's theory about medicalization and Foucault?s theory about power. We have from a literature-exposition of Swedish articles from 1989 to 2006, done a social constructive discourse analysis with help from Laclau & Mouffe's discourse theory, and Fairclough's model of social practices. In our textual analysis we found three dominating discourses: A medical discourse, a social/cultural discourse and a general/popular discourse.