The focus of this two year master?s thesis in Library- and Information science is the study of two Swedish Public Library buildings with the examples Lomma and Halmstad. The main goal and purpose of the thesis is to try to uncover which views and values of the public library are expressed in the examined libraries; and to what extent these views manifests are shown in its architecture.The theoretical framework is based on Raymond Williams?s cultural concepts of effective, dominant culture and the two extremities of this culture, called residual and emergent cultures. A second aspect is Yi-Fu Tuans concepts of Space and Place.

The aim of this essay is to give a picture of the extension work at Partille Public Library, asit is today, as well as to investigate if there is a need to reconsider the way of working at thelibrary.Qualitative interviews have been made with the extensive librarians and certain local governmentpoliticians, borrowers and personnel at hospitals as well as other institutions.The extension work at Partille Public Library corresponds quite well to the intentions whichare stated for the work in certain important investigations made by the Government. Theborrowers and the personnel are quite satisfied with the work and are only pointing out a fewviews on changes. The politicians mean that the aim of the extension work of the library ison one hand to give service to certain more or less neglected groups and on the other handto reach new book readers..

This is a qualitative study with a reflexive approach. The aim of this masters thesis is to describe how the internal information is managed in Borås Theatre and Borås Public Library related to the internal flow of information within the organisations according to descriptions of different units, staff and work tasks. Ten qualitative semi-structured interviews with employees at the Theatre and the Library have been conducted. The organisations have been studied separately. The interviews are presented according to six categories presented in the theory chapter as a result of the study.

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.

In 1972 a national higher education for librarians was started. Up until then different categories of librarians got their education separately. The aim of this Master's thesis is to explore the attitude towards this new education for librarians. The study will concentrate on the attitude of the representatives from the research libraries. Researchlibraries had, until 1972, recruted their librarians amongst Ph.D-level scholars.

The aim of this bachelor thesis has been to examine and develop our own understanding about how young people in Sweden (16-29 years of age), take part in cultural activities. As librarians it is important to know what kind of activities and interests this particular group has. With Pierre Bourdieu?s theoretical framework towards habitus and capital we are interested to see if there is a connection between one?s cultural use and background, if different access to capital with or within groups has an affect or not. With both statistics and interviews with people within our target, we believe this data has been sufficient enough to conduct a good and valid study.

The aim of this master thesis is to find out if young people and librarians think that reference groups can support public libraries to meet the needs of young people, and if the reference groups, which the librarians describe, differentiates from the young peoples requirements. I have made a qualitative study with a questionnaire to six librarians who have experience from reference groups and ten interviews with teenagers. The result showed that young people have many interests and needs which can be met from the library. The teenagers were positive to the library and many of them showed interest in having more influence on the library. Many would like to join a reference group, but on the condition that they would be offered real influence.

The Internet has played an important role for libraries giving them a means of fulfilling their democratic mission of giving equal access to everyone, including people with disabilities. In order to achieve this it is of the utmost importance that they ensure that their web sites are accessible. In this masters thesis we have examined to what extent the web sites are accessible. The thesis is based on theories of human-computer interaction, information architecture, pedagogy and a checklist. The checklist is derived from established international guidelines from W3C, which has been adapted to, and is used by Swedish public authorities to achieve the mission of a ?24-hour authority?.

The question whether controlled vocabulary or natural language free-text terms is the most effective search strategy has occupied researchers in LIS for many decades. This Masters thesis is an empirical study which aims to compare these two search strategies in LISA Library and Information Science Abstracts, an online bibliographic database. 22 topics from the discipline of Library and Information Science were constructed and out of each topic one query for each search strategy was formed. Queries in natural language were formed with terms from different sources, for example dictionaries, while queries in controlled vocabulary were built with terms from LISAs electronic thesaurus. The measures used in this study were precision, relative recall pooling method and overlap.

The purpose of this paper has been to study the relationships and attitudes of a few teachers and librarians as to their co-operation in a combined public and upper secondary school library and to find out what circumstances there may be to exert an influence on their work. The paper has been based upon qualitative interviews with upper secondary school teachers and librarians as well as on studies of literature relating to our issue. We believe there may be different approaches to the learning process, as these are the relations and attitudes of two professions from different trades. That is why our point of departure has been Roger Säljö's theory about learning and, in our analysis, a few of Jean Donham van Deusen's ideas of joint planning and flexible timetabling. All respondents agreed that co-operation could be better, but the teachers were of the opinion that it must not interfere with their time.

The main aim of this thesis is to study how and in which way the library personnel works with reading groups and their view of reading groups. I also want to study which role the governing- and policy documents have in the library personnel?s work. The following questions were asked.Which similarities and differences between the different library personals outlooks and acting can be interpreted from the following aspects:? Promoting reading, book selections and the leader's role?? To talk about personal subjects and to create possibilities for personal growth and increased empathy?? To promote language development and reading comprehension?The methods used in the study are a combination of interviews and observations.

This essay aims to investigate how Swedish Public Libraries market their activities in video games for youths. It also highlights how the library, on the basis of the unique opportunities of the video game medium, can develop this marketing to build a relationship with youths. The empiric evidence is based on a survey of answers given by 30 librarians responsible for video game collections, and qualitative telephone interviews with three of them. The essay?s theoretical framework is based on Philip Kotler and his co-authors? marketing theory which consists of five stages: Marketing research, segmentation, marketing mix, implementation and development.

The purpose of this master?s thesis is to examine the activity at the library and preschool at Kristineberg (a part of the town of Borås) and its underlying approach. How do the activities agree with the ideological attitudes of the 1970s? To answer these questions I have carried out a case study based on qualitative interviews. The theoretical background includes ideas of the library, the community center and the cultural activity at the library.

The structure of the Swedish public library field has been evolving during the last decades. The traditional mission of educating the citizens to become responsible, democratic and knowledgeable members of society has in a way led to the integration between public and school libraries. Lately new co-operational models have been under debate and a sense of resistance has arisen because of the economical and market influences. In parallel with closure of library branches new libraries have evolved in malls and wash houses and some with self-service with no use of librarians. This work shows how co-operation in rural areas finds the common goals for the people living there who are concerned about keeping the service needed including the public library and thus using existing means and crossing borders of commercial thinking.

Libraries all over the world struggle against the threat of decreased funding and a lack of governmental interest. In countries with an under-developed library sector the interest from the government is often minimal or non-existent. Since the 80´s Sida, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency has contributed to the library development in Central America through the Royal Library of Sweden. Nicaragua was the first country to be counterpart in the project. For a period of eight weeks I have completed a field study in Nicaragua and visited the National Library Rubén Darío and public libraries in the country.