This bachelor?s thesis examines costs of welfare services in municipalities of the region of Västra Götaland in Sweden. Previous research provided reasons to expect a link between costs of welfare services and demographic changes. Furthermore, Willam J. Baumol?s theory about ?the cost disease? also provided reasons to expect a link between welfare services and salary levels.

This thesis is an evaluation of the campaign [The digitally curious] that is part of the regional marketing campaign Futurum.kom. Its purpose was to strengthen the library's role in society. The campaign includes Regionbibliotek Kalmar, Länsbibliotek Sydost and also 25 public libraries in Kronoberg, Kalmar and Blekinge. The campaign [The digitally curious] is one of several cluster campaigns targeting their marketing to a specific audience and aims to promote awareness of what libraries have to offer and provide information on digital media and services. The target group for the campaign is a man between 45-65 years old, who is interested in digital technology.

Local history collections are fairly common among the Swedish public libraries and these collections often contain older or rare material. There are no national policies concerning the preservation of rare books at the public libraries, and the librarians of public libraries may lack that knowledge. The aim of this study is to examine librarians? attitudes toward their libraries? local history collections. We interviewed five librarians in the county of Västra Götaland and also made a small observation study of their local history collections.

CGI är ett av världen största IT-tjänsteföretag med säte i Kanada. I Sverige erbjuder CGI flera tjänster där Business Process Services (BPS) är en av dem. Inom BPS finns grupperingen Data Documenting Services (DDS). DDS:s uppgift är att förmedla meddelanden till och mellan såväl människor som företag, via olika kanaler. Meddelanden som förmedlas i form av fysiska utskrifter, exempelvis administrativ post, hanteras inom tjänsten Printing Services.

The purpose of this study is to investigate? how a professional librarian can support the work with pupils, age six to twelve years, in their reading and linguistic development? how the conditions at the school have to be for this to become possible? what kind of attitudes the teachers have, and how they relate to the impact of a librarian for the pupils reading and linguistic development.The methods used are analyses of steering documents concerning school libraries and analyses of the means of the local school culture. The latter has been carried out by literature studies and through interviews of eight teachers and two school librarians. The result of the interviews showed a limited insight into how a professional librarian can support and assist teachers and pupils in the work with reading and linguistic development. They also showed the influence of existing traditions and local school culture for the use of a librarian?s services, and also how all the teachers, once they have become used to the services a librarian can provide, now find their support invaluable.

The purpose of this master thesis is to describe and analyse the development of the library history in the municipality of Karlsborg. This is done with a comparison to the library development in Sweden as a whole and in particular to the cities of Lidköping and Halmstad. I have worked according to the following questions: 1. How did the libraries develop before the municipality took over? 2.

AbstractAttitudes towards the reference situation and the meetings between library users and librarians have become the subject of much debate in the library setting today. The aim of this two years master´s thesis has been to examine six librarian?s attitudes and apprehensions concerning the interactions between the librarian and the users in the library setting. We were also interested in knowing how a library can work to become more service oriented and customer centred. We conducted six interviews with librarians located at three different libraries in Sweden.

The aim of this essay was to examine what kind of help and support social services departement can offer gamblers and their relatives. We also want to examine what the relatives to the gamblers think about the help and support they have got from the social services departement. Central questions we asked were: What kind of help and support can social services department offer the gamblers and there relatives? What kind of help is there to get for children respectively adult relatives? Do the relatives consider that the social worker have enough knowledge about the problem? Do the social workers consider that they have enough knowledge about the problem? This is a qualitative study of three women relatives to the gamblers, three social workers and one specialist in this problem. We have delimited the study to one big city in Sweden.

The aim of this master?s thesis is to investigate a possible connection between the development of mobile library services in Sweden and the development of cultural policy during 1945-2006. Our main question is: is there a connection between the development of the mobile library services in Sweden, as described in Biblioteksbladet, and the development of cultural policy as portrayed by Anders Frenander and Dorte Skot-Hansen? In order to answer this question, we formulated two secondary questions: - How are the mobile library services described in Biblioteksbladet between 1945 and 2006? - Are there any similarities or dissimilarities between the development of the mobile library services and the development cultural policy as described in our theoretical models? If so, in what way? Our study covers the entire time period since the start of the mobile library services in Sweden in the late 1940s. The final year for our investigation is 2006.

The aim of this Master's thesis is to study what place public libraries have in local politics, particularly from the point of view of the politicians. To answer this, I have interviewed politicians, participated as a silent observer of a public debate, and studied articles on library politics in newspapers and other press. The results show that politicians in general have a positive view of libraries and good co-operation with library professionals, and that they have a fairly up-to-date view of libraries. They are, however, less interested in library issues in general, and are often complacent with the way things are already running. The newspaper studies show that library issues are usually only discussed when a specific library is somehow in danger.

Little attention has been paid in the literature to libraryassistants in Swedish public libraries. In this bachelor thesis,the professional role, work duties, career prospects and statusof library assistants are examined at two public libraries.Because of a scarcity of published information on thedevelopment of this profession in Swedish public libraries,retired library assistants, as well as currently employedlibrary assistants, librarians and a library head wereinterviewed.Since the ?80s, work duties of library assistants havechanged, with a reduction in some of the more manualaspects of library work, the development of new duties and,overall, an increasing similarity in the duties performed bylibrary assistants and librarians.Additionally, the public perception of library assistants as acategory distinct from librarians was investigated bydistributing questionnaires to library patrons. Contrary toexpectations prompted by statements in the literature, asubstantial portion of visitors was found to be aware of thetwo separate categories.Library assistants at Swedish libraries have no careerprospects, unless they undertake studies in their own freetime and at their own cost, and obtain a librarian degree. Adifference between the situation of library assistants inSweden and corresponding professional categories in a fewother countries is that, at present and for several years, noformal education for library assistants has been available inSweden.

The thesis deals with consumers behaviour in the use of online services and the cultures effect on it. It is a study of Swedes and Danes use of online job data bases. The thesis is based on a quantitative study. A questionnaire were used sent out to 80 Swedes and 80 Danes. The theory concerns areas of online consumer behaviour, decision making and services theory as well as theories within culture in relation to services and behaviour.

This master thesis is an attempt to study the joint-use solutions between the public library and the public preschool in the local district Kristineberg in the community of Borås. The two main questions are; what kind of joint-use library is the activity at Kristineberg? What kind of advantages and disadvantages do the actors experience from the joint-use activity at Kristineberg? The analysis is based upon the interviews with eight informants with different connections to the joint-use library and public preschool. I also use documental analysis and literature studies. Relevant theories, such as Andersson´s and Skot-Hansen´s analysis of the role of the public library and Bundys, Imhoff´s and Dornseif´s theories about joint-use libraries are presented and later used in the analysis.

This thesis researches the value creation process in Internet based subscription services in accordance with service dominant logic. The aim of the paper is to identify the characteristics of these services and to envisage the future of Internet based subscription services. The authors have utilized a qualitative method in their research which consists of personal interviews as well as a focus group. The main theoretical subjects that are discussed are value creation, customer participation and service dominant logic. The paper analyses the empirical findings by matching them with the theoretical framework.

When studying the voting behaviour of the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) concerning the Services Directive within the EU, what patterns can be observed? With a starting point in previous findings about voting behaviour, this study analyses the results of the given Roll-call votes in the European Parliament in regards to the Services Directive. Here I focus on the division of votes within and between the member states and the parliamentary political groups; with the aim to identify patterns that might show clash of opinion concerning this issue. I found that ideology seems to play a role in the MEPs voting behaviour. Parties on the far left reach the highest level of cohesion and together with the party on the far right, they voted against the Directive, but due to different reasons.