The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine the view of funding and sponsorship of culture within Swedish governmental cultural policy. The main issue is to discover changes in attitude towards funding and sponsorship of culture by comparing the discourse of cultural policy in the 1970s with the discourse of cultural policy in the 1990s. The theoretical and methological starting point is Ernesto Laclaus and Chantal Mouffes discourse theory. Another theoretical starting point is Danish cultural policy reasearcher Dorte Skot-Hansens theories of the development of cultural policy in the Nordic countries, and Norman Faircloughs, of critical discourse analysis, theory of the marketization of discourse. Four governmental cultural policy documents, two from the 1970s and two from the 1990s, are analysed through a model loosely based on Laclaus and Mouffes idea of nodalpoints and elements constituting a discourse.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine how two novels written by the Swedish author Pär Lagerkvist have been received by the critics in the Swedish daily press concerning their contemporary anchorage. During the time these novels were published, Pär Lagerkvist, through his authorship, expressed a conception of and an attitude towards contemporary political directions. The first of the two novels, The Hangman, was published in 1933, and the second, The Dwarf, in 1944. A second aim is to examine how the two novels contemporary anchorage is reflected in the reviews. The final aim is to examine whether the criticism differs depending on the ideological view of the newspapers.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to examine the representation of student life in Uppsala in the 1860s and 1870s in memoirs. This purpose is achieved by contextualising the memoirs in two different analyses. In the first, the representation of student life in the memoirs is compared to that in another literary genre, the university novel, and it is found that the two representational forms paint completely contradictory pictures, where in the novels the higher education is depicted as rotten and in dire need of reformation, whereas in the memoirs the system, albeit somewhat flawed, works. The memoirs and the novels thus seem to be competing systems of representation, created in different discourses, wherein the purpose and nature of higher education widely differed. In the second analysis, the examination of the memoirs is based on research concerning the nation building process in Sweden during the 19th century.

The aim of this masters thesis is to examine how the educational work of the Swedish public library was regarded in the Swedish library journal Biblioteksbladet at three different periods of the twentieth century, i.e. the thirties, the sixties and the nineties. Using a theoretical framework from the field of professionalization and a methodological framework of hermeneutics, it is shown that the educational work of the thirties can be described as having a focus on free learning whereas the educational work of the sixties can be described as having a focus on public utility. The educational work of the nineties focuses on the information seeking process of the user. It is noted that this development during the century can be understood as a shift of the cognitive authority of the public librarians.

An information audit identifies, among other things, organizations information resources, the information flow and the needs of the information users. The purpose of this masters thesis was to describe the management of information within a local unit of Borås municipality by putting an information audit-method in practice. The focus was on three issues: What information needs could be seen in the organization? How does the information flow through the organization? How does Sugan Henczels seven-stage model serve as a tool to map the management of information within the local unit? The study only described the situation at a certain time at the chosen organization. The seven-stage information audit model was revised and adjusted to the studied organization by only carrying out four of the seven steps: Planning, Data collection, Data analysis and Data evaluation.

The main purpose of this study is to investigate and understand how technology students handle information especially when they are working with their Masters thesis. A further purpose is to examine how technology students use library resources of the Linköping University. The research method used is grounded theory, where description of the method is an integral part of the study. Twelve qualitative interviews were made with newly qualified graduates from the engineering programs of Linköping Institute of Technology. The respondents were divided into two groups, A and B, with six in each group.

vuxnas läsning av skönlitteratur I became happier and wiser: young adults reading of fiction [123[upps-01.gif This Masters thesis explores young adults 18-26 years old, reading of fiction: their reading preferences, the meaning of reading and their access to literature. A study was made by way of a questionnaire, including 56 young adults, and seven qualitative interviews with two groups: one at a folk highschool and the other at a public library. The theories we have used to analyse the results are: theories of gender and youth, theories of literary genres, reader-response criticism, literature sociology and the theories of cultural sociology by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In the analysis the results are compared to other studies of reading habits. Results from this study show that the young adults read fiction from several genres among popular- and quality literature.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to study opinions about the Swedish hospital libraries and their activities for the patients, in a selection of Swedish library journal articles. The theoretical starting point is grounded in Laclau and Mouffes discourse theory. The empirical material consists of 43 articles from three library journals; Biblioteksbladet, Blänkaren and DIK-forum, published between 1990 and 2004. These are analysed through a reading scheme in four levels. In the empirical material two themes appear; the culture theme and the patient information theme.

The aim of this masters thesis is to examine the information access of female Ph. D. students in connection with their situation as women and researchers within the academic setting. In order to examine this, qualitative interviews with ten female Ph. D.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to investigate how trained social workers experience information in their daily work. The thesis focussed on three major questions: - What type of information and information sources are mostly used by the trained social workers? - What kind of information barriers are described by the participants? - How can the patterns of information seeking and information use be understood on the basis of the trained social workers professional and social context? Semi-structured interviews were carried out with trained social workers working with child welfare enquiries. My theoretical framework consists of user and context oriented theories about classifications of information, information barriers and models of information sources. My conclusions are that trained social workers working with risk assessment in child protection services, need to use different kinds of information in their daily work, such as problem information, domain information and problem-solving information.

This masters thesis shows that the changes in the scientific publishing system have affected the academic libraries. Both technological change and the increased prices on scientific journals have forced academic libraries to take action. Some Swedish academic libraries have started publishing the university s own research material. The issue has in many cases been treated more as a library concern, than as a concern for the university as a whole. Neither has there been a national coordination of these matters in Sweden.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to deepen the understanding of how society affects literary criticism by studying the reception of two Swedish dystopian novels and their contemporary anchorage. The questions that we answer here are concerned with how critics have drawn parallels between the novels and events occurring in the contemporary society, and how the critics outlook on the future are connected to ideas about the future in the novels. The first novel, Kallocain 1940 by Karin Boye has been interpreted as a critical statement directed towards totalitarian ideologies. The second novel, After the Flood 1982 by P C Jersild, has been seen as a warning against nuclear warfare. This qualitative study is based on 41 reviews from Swedish daily press.

The main purpose of this Masters thesis was to examine how the Internet and other electronic sources have affected public librarians use of printed reference sources. During the last couple of years the use of the electronic sources - in particular the Internet has become more established in the Swedish public libraries. Our aim was to examine if and how this has affected the use of the printed reference sources. This has been examined on the basis of the following factors: the gender and age of the librarians and how long they have served in the library. We also examined if the size of the library affects the use of the printed and the electronic reference sources and also which factors that are most important when librarians acquire reference sources.

This study is a statistical content analysis, of masters? theses written in 2005 at the Swedish School of Library and Information Studies in Borås. The relations between their epistemological discourses, theories, methods, themes and chosen alignment within the education, the so-called ?kollegium?/college, are examined. The results are put in relation to the concepts multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity to see what kind of discipline Library and Information Science (LIS) can be described as, on the basis of this material.

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to examine the attitudes of deaf and hear-impaired people towards libraries, information, and culture. The issues are: What are the attitudes of the informants towards libraries and culture? What do reference group theory and the theory of information access-/avoidance implicate concerning the information behaviour of the informants? In-depth interviews with five deaf and hear-impaired university students have been carried out in this qualitative study. The world of deaf and hear-impaired people is presented as well as a survey of political guidelines to make, for example, libraries and theatres more available to disabled people. The research overview analyses scholarly studies on deaf and hear-impaired people.