The aim of this Master's thesis is to investigate the importance of subject expertise for academic librarians in Skåne. Virtually all librarians in Sweden have studied other subjects besides library and information science (LIS) before becoming librarians, and in this thesis we ask what happens to this expertise. How many librarians can be said to have a good background in the subjects they are working with? Do academic librarians use their subject knowledge on the job? Does it make a difference what subject one has studied when it comes to job opportunities? What do librarians themselves think of the importance of subject expertise? We are also interested in finding out how subject expertise fits in with the growing professionalization of librarianship.A quantitative questionnaire was sent to 195 academic librarians at four different institutes of higher education in Skåne. A total of 107 librarians answered questions about their LIS education, subject background and current job as well questions on how important they perceived a subject background to be for themselves and for academic librarians in general.

This thesis examines the perception and use of the school library for students at an Upper Secondary School. The school has a high frequent of immigrant students, and the students interviewed all have an immigrant background. The intention was to find out how the students used the school library and what perception they have of the school library. The method used was semi-structured interviews with eight students, both males and females, who studies different educational programs. The instrument of theory was that from Elisabeth Tallaksen Rafste?s theoretical framework.

The aim of this study is to examine a number of Swedish working public librarians and compare them with some popular standard images of librarians. In this project we have been working in line with these three questions: How do the librarians describe themselves and how can the descriptions be interpreted? What images are the most common and repetitive, according to earlier research? What differences and similarities are there between the images of the librarians and the working librarians? To answer the questions we have performed seven qualitative interviews with working librarians and collected relevant literature that presents various portrayals of librarians. To interpret the interviews we have used Pierre Bourdieus theories of social space, social fields, habitus and the cultural, academic, social and the economic capitals, as well as the connection between individual taste, class and social power. The conclusions of the collected material of earlier research and the interpreted material from the interviews have been compared and discussed.

The purpose of this Bachelor?s thesis was to explore how principals and school administrators work to develop their school libraries. To narrow our area of study we chose to only include gymnasiums run by the municipality and conducted four semi-structured interviews with two principals and two heads of upper secondary school. We formulated two questions: (1) what perceptions of the school library and its functions can be found among our four respondents? And, (2) how do they work with developing the school library? As a theoretical framework we used Loertscher?s taxonomy of the school leader.

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine how the images of librarians are conceived and held by the public. It has often been claimed that librarians are subject to widely spread negative stereotyping. My purpose is to study the nature and origin of these stereotypes. Since popular media is one source of these stereotypes and images I have chosen to look into how librarians are characterized in 20 Swedish novels written between 1982-2002. The questions this thesis aims to answer are: What images of librarians occur in the novels? How are the tasks of the librarians respectively described in the novels? How are female and male librarians respectively described? The analysis of the novels is then compared with interviews with three professional librarians about their view of their professional role and their perceptions of its status and image.

This master thesis is aiming to find out how school libraries work towards children in school years 1-6. The mainfocus is how the School librarians and teachers work with literature and reading. The theoretical viewpoints aremainly the sociocultural theory and the child perspective.The study was conducted with participants from five different schools in Uppsala, in the form of qualitativesemi-structured interviews. The results show that schools work with literature first and foremost in a pragmaticway, with reading-strategies and activating discussions. Very little time is spent on reading for its own sake.

The aim of this Bachelor?s thesis is to find out what librarians think about the public libraries? collections. How do they want to develop their collection and what do they want the collection to offer society?Sanna Talja has developed a theory about different attitudes regarding collection development. These are named ?the general education repertoire?, ?the alternative repertoire? and ?the demand repertoire?.

The aim of this masters thesis is to explore a mediators practical procedure during booktalks. The main question is: Why do librarians have booktalks and what does it mean to have booktalks for children? In order to answer our main question, we have used these three questions: - Why do our interviewed librarians have booktalks? - How do our informants prepare their booktalks and what do their presentations look like? - Do our informants have any follow-ups of their booktalks and if so, how do they do that? To limit the thesis, we have concentrated our study to Swedish public libraries and to children in the elementary school. We have conducted qualitative interviews with three librarians who do booktalks for children as a part of their job. The thesis theoretical basis is Aidan Chambers theory about the Reading Circle and especially the parts enabling adult and selection.

The aim of this study is about how School librarians useweblogs as a working tool. I wanted to examine how someSchool librarians use weblogs as a working tool and why theyare using them. I also wanted to know the advantages anddisadvantages they see with this tool. I believe that children andteenagers are interested in social media- tools and also are bigusers and consumers of these tools. Therefore I thought it mightbe interesting to examine how School librarians who havechildren and young people as their main target group, work withweblogs which is one of many social media tools.The methodology used for this study is interviews.

The purpose of this thesis is to study how children's librarians in public libraries use non-fiction books in their work to promote reading. My research questions are: What methods do children's librarians use för promoting non-fiction books? Are there children who can gain more from non-fiction books than other children do? Are there any differences in working with fiction and non-fiction books? To answer these questions I have interwieved five children's librarians about their methods, attitudes and thoughts on non-fiction books.The result shows that all of the librarians use non-fiction when it comes to promotion reading but not to the same extent. Some hardly use it at all, mainly because the schools that they are serving demands fiction books when practicing reading skills. while others use it but in less extent than fiction, as a way of separating the library reading from school work either because they want to keep the experience of reading in the library apart from school work or because they find it more efficient to do so.

The purpose of this essay is to examine how high school students (age 13 to 19) search for information on the web and in databases. Furthermore, it aims to look into how critical of sources they are. The questions asked was: how the students search for information in digital media? Which kind of sources do the students use? How they evaluate the information they find? Do they get any education in information retrieval and source evaluation? To answer these questions students were interviewed in groups about their information retrieval behavior. Furthermore two School librarians were interviewed about their experience of the students? information retrieval.During the interviews it was clear that the students had received quite sparse instructions on the subjects of information retrieval and criticism of the sources.

Purpose: This thesis aims to study how students in upper secondary school evaluate sources in their everyday school work and how the role of the school library and librarian officiate in this context.Methodology: A web questionnaire was conducted and 155 students from different schools, with or without school library and school librarian, participated. We coded and aggregated the questionnaires according to the strategies that are used when evaluating sources, identified by Francke, Sundin and Limberg. Cognitive authority, a theory by Patrick Wilson, was also a part of our analysis. Conclusions: The study shows that students use different strategies, separately or combined, as a way to evaluate sources. The teacher is regarded as a cognitive authority and is the main influence concerning source evaluation. It also shows that the role of school libraries and School librarians, in this context, seem to be non-existent.

The Swedish academic libraries have gone trough radical changes during the last decades. The development of information technology, the educational expansion and new pedagogical ways of learning within the higher educational system have changed the conditions, not only for the academic libraries, but also in many ways for the librarians. The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine how Swedish librarians experience their pedagogic role and task in the context of an academic library. The following four questions in this investigation were asked: How do the librarians experience the formal task that they have? How do the librarians experience the physical library environment? How do the librarians experience the co-operation with others involved in their work? How do the librarians experience their own pedagogic knowledge and competence in their daily practice? The study showed that these librarians believed the physical environment to be very important and is seen as a pedagogical tool in their daily work.

In this thesis I investigate what librarians working with children do for six-year-olds at the libraries in order to stimulate them to read. I also investigate how children of this age read and what books are like for these beginners. The background for the thesis is that reading decreased a lot in ages three to eight during the 1980s and 1990s. My aim is to see what projects, methods and other strategies there are to get children to read. The method used is case study.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine seven public librarians? attitudes towards manga as a new kind of literature in public libraries. Manga is an art form, originally from Japan, but in recent years manga has become very popular in the Western societies. The main issue of this thesis is how the librarians? look at manga and what they think about manga.