We have during these three past years been getting formal knowledge in business economics and believe that, now in the end of our education, we are qualified to the demands that are put on the labour market. The purpose of this report has been to write about, such an extensive subject area as public purchase though we feel the education is lacking this area and have therefore decided to do our dissertation in public purchase.Due to lack of time we have not been able to investigate in the extent we wanted, we had to delimit in sort of municipality and purchase product. We have been investigating in how the process of purchase of aid in Malmö municipality approaches because we wanted to enter deeply into those studies.This rapport represents the process of public purchases of aid from both the suppliers point of view as well as the purchase units. All the steps in the process are presented in our investigation.By writing this rapport we have presented the division of responsibility of aid, it is divided between Region Skåne and the municipality in Skåne. In Malmö the responsibility is divided between two activities, one of them is Hjälpmedelcentrum who is responsible of the municipality part and the other is Hjälpmedel Malmö who.s responsible of the regional part.We have decided to investigate only on the municipality part of the responsibility division and have gradually found out that they in Hjälpmedelcentrum reuse their aids after them being returned from the needed ones in the municipality or even after that the need has stopped, the unit can by reuse save on new purchases.In the end of writing this rapport we noticed that owners of small businesses have a difficult time of getting in the market of public purchase.

The purpose of this Master thesis is to examine whether the term elasticity is relevant and functional to apply to public library organisations. Another aim of the thesis is to relate the term elasticity to public library organisations in a network society. Sociologist Manuel Castells provide the theoretical framework on the network society. Three investigations (meant to complement each other) in two Swedish public libraries seek to give answers to these questions.To be able to examine which areas of public library activity are elastic, I make a rough definition of what public library organisations consist of ? nine activity fields are identified using IFLA?s guidelines in combination with Swedish law of public libraries.

The purpose of this thesis is, from a self directed learning perspective, to investigate the support of public libraries and genealogy associations of genealogists' own research, i.e. their search for ancestors as well as their possibilities to broaden their history outlook. Accordingly, five public librarians and five genealogy representatives in the west of Sweden have been interviewed regarding the support that can be offered to genealogists. The investigated support to genealogists in their own research is about working environment, literature and material, activities and the cooperation between public libraries and genealogy associations. In this thesis conclusions are merely drawn from a self-directed learning perspective, a perspective where also different forms of support are being recommended by scientists.

Today, "the digital library" is the common way of describing a managed collection of information, with associated services, stored in digital formats and accessible over a network. Digital libraries have mainly been developed at research libraries, but during the last few years public libraries have started to offer similar services.The aim of this Master's thesis is to study how the Swedish public libraries plan to develop their digital libraries according to their mission statements, and in what way they have implemented them at their web sites. 21 public libraries, the largest in each Swedish county, were investigated.The library mission statements are investigated to find out in what terms the digital libraries are described and to what extent. The library websites are examined with respect to what kind of digital services are offered, to what extent they supplement or replace the physical library, and if there are new digital services not found in the physical library.In most mission statements the digital library is referred to in sweeping terms like "IT activities" and "new media". However, a few of the libraries clearly regard the digital library as an important part of the future operations, speaking of it in well defined and extensive terms.The public library websites are relatively homogeneous when it comes to services supplementing physical library activities, like web access to the library catalogue and links to other library catalogues.

In a web environment the library and the librarian continue to function in their role as information provider even when the physical library is closed. Research question is to describe how and in what extent the public libraries websites are integrated in their daily activity and what the causes are for that. The empirical material consists of a survey of number of public libraries websites and qualitative interviews with responsible librarians. I have delimited the study by only investigating the websites of Gothenburg public libraries. In my survey of the websites I have studied four spheres; Services, Contact, Structure and General viewpoints.

The aim of this thesis is to study how public libraries in Sweden use alternative shelf arrangements that differ from the library?s original classification system, which in Swedish public libraries usually is the SAB-system. I sent out a survey to 169 public libraries, where I received 114 replies. 77 of these stated that they had some kind of alternative shelf arrangement, therefore these are the ones that are included in my study. I wanted to investigate in what way the libraries had changed their shelf arrangement and why this decision was made.

During the late twentieth century, political and societal changes gave rise to an increased interest in performance evaluation in public organizations. This development also affected libraries in the public sector. The main concern for this master thesis is performance measurement in libraries. In this study two different types of libraries are investigated, one public and the other academic. My aim is to find out if and how performance measurement appears in the libraries annual activity reports.

The aim of this study is to investigate the public libraries use of their websites in their marketing. Our study is based on the websites of 60 public libraries. The libraries are chosen because of their geographical location in three different provinces? Skåne in the south, Östergötland in the middle and Norrbotten in the north. These three choices enable us to cover densely as well as thinly populated areas, the agricultural district, the woodland and cities of various sizes.

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 purpose of this thesis is to examine how five public libraries reason about the use of social media in their day-to-day work. This thesis aim to answer three research questions: What is the libraries use of social media today? How do libraries look upon their own use of social media? And have the libraries formulated any goals about their use of social media, and what are their thoughts on this? The methodology used in this thesis is a content analysis of the libraries social media and a questionnaire interview which was sent by mail to all of the libraries involved. The theoretical framework for the thesis is a model developed by Jochumsen, Hvenegaard Rasmussen and Skot-Hansen.The results of our study shows that the room of meetings, from the theoretical framework, are the most represented in the content of the social media used by the libraries. The libraries find that social media is a good way to connect and communicate with their users, but they feel that the time they spend on their social media is not enough.Our study also shows that most of the libraries have not formulated any goals for their use of social media, and that they do not have any intentions to do so..

The aim of this thesis is to investigate how the indexing of fiction for adults looks like in the public libraries that don?t buy indexed records for fiction from Bibliotekstjänst (BTJ). The questions that I want these libraries to answer is: - Public libraries that index fiction for adults themselves: 1. What tools do they use when indexing?, 2.

The aim of this master?s thesis is to examine libraries which combine the functions of school- and public library and to evaluate the staff?s experience and attitude towards a library profile with the emphasis on children and youth. The purpose of the study is also to examine how the libraries work with several tasks and functions within different target groups with different needs.With new institutionalism and Scandinavian institutional theory the thesis examine the library as an organization and what influences the construction. With a model that describes how the library constitutes four different rooms in the society I investigate the different functions.The methodology is qualitative with interviews of five persons of the staff, four librarians and one library assistant. The study examines how the staff that works at two libraries under similar conditions experiences their tasks.

This paper deals with how people use public libraries. An attempt is made to distinguishbetween different user groups on the basis of how they use the library. The roles of thelibrary in relation to its users are also discussed.The paper is based on a user study with the cooperation of 195 users. The user studywas carried out at the Public Library of Alingsås 1994. As material for comparisonsimilar studies from Sweden, but even from Denmark, have been used.

The aim of this master?s thesis is to examine the roles ofthree different public libraries in three differentcommunities. In order to get some answers about the roles ofthe public libraries I have used the following questions: Howis the local cultural policy formulated? How is the locallibrary structured? What or which profiles has the publiclibraries in the three communities?I have made three qualitative case-studies in three differentcommunities. These three communities are somewhatlocated in the same area in order to identify any cooperationbetween them.

As the way of communicating and accessing information has changed radically over thepast decade so has the way the public libraries operate to reach the citizens. In thesetimes the demands of what a public library should be and offer the visitors havechanged. One should have the option to access the digital public library at any givenhour of the day, from anywhere in the world and at least have the same possibilities ofinformation as the visitors at the non-digital, "real" library.In this Master's thesis we will analyze and discuss the condition of the Swedish digitalpublic library of today, 2006, and the forward thinking work with the issues ofdevelopment in this matter. In order to do this we set out to examine the attitudetowards the public digital library among the staff at a small number of Swedish publiclibraries and their supporting institution, the county library. Moreover, the attitudesdefined have been compared to the actual status of the services and medias at the publiclibrary websites.In conclusion, we have detected a certain standardization of what the digital publiclibrary consists of today.