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.

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.

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 Masters thesis is to investigate how a group of Academic librarians perceive distance learners as a user group. We have in our study been influenced by phenomenography, which is both a set of theoretical assumptions and a methodology. The theoretical frame of reference consists of Carol Kuhlthaus different levels of education and Michael Buckland´s information barriers. Using a qualitative method consisting of nine interviews with Academic librarians and structural factor such as academic library policies, we have been able to conduct our study. The results of the study are presented in grouped categories of quotations that reflect various perceptions.

Swedish university libraries traditionally collect recreational readingmaterial only to support the teaching and research interests of theirinstitutions. However many university libraries hold a substantial yetunspecified collection of popular fiction. This thesis investigates theextent of these collections and examines Academic librarians' viewsabout students' recreational reading in the academic context and theirattitudes towards the role of fiction and of readers' advisory inacademic libraries. The theoretical framework includes literature andresearch about the benefits of reading for pleasure, collections' rolesand readers' advisory strategies. The empirical material was gatheredthrough quantitative surveys sent to Academic librarians in Sweden.The results show that Academic librarians are positive about thebenefits of recreational reading for university students.

User-centred acquisitions at three academic librariesA new way of developing collections has been adopted at a number of small academic libraries, user-centred acquisitions. The method implies that the main way of building the collection is by means of receiving suggestions of titles from library users. The main purpose of this thesis is to investigate changes in acquisitions of monographs. At a more detailed level it seeks a deeper understanding of what user-centred acquisitions is and how the method effects the acquisitions process. Changes in stock management and the reason why the libraries have chosen the method is investigated as well.

The aim of this master thesis is to study how Academic librarians can overcome the gap between themselves and the user. The gap, as we see it, is generated by the user's deeper knowledge surrounding her subject in comparison to the librarian. This knowledge gives the user possibilities to handle certain discourses attached to the subject and a knowledge how sub-subjects relate to each other within the main subject. At the same time the user is in need of help to find information within her subject, this need needs to be explained to the librarian as a search expert. The scope of this master thesis is to find how the librarian, tactically, can reach the users need despite lack of subject knowledge.

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 purpose of this Master?s thesis is to investigate how Academic librarians experience reference work aimed at international students. International students are a growing usergroup in Swedish academic libraries. The study?s main research question is:- How do Academic librarians experience reference work aimed at international students?The study was performed with a phenomenographic methodological approach where seven qualitative interviews with Academic librarians were conducted.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how Academic librarians seek information for themselves and for others, and what differences exist. The terms self-generated and imposed information seeking is used to describe the two different types of information seeking. Step 2 ? define and understand the problem, step 3 ? choose a search system and step 4 ? formulate a query of Marchionini?s information-seeking model forms the basis of the theoretical framework, which is supplemented with Soergel and Katz. Qualitative interviews with eight Academic librarians were conducted and analyzed in order to gather empirical facts.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how Academic librarians seek information for themselves and for others, and what differences exist. The terms self-generated and imposed information seeking is used to describe the two different types of information seeking. Step 2 ? define and understand the problem, step 3 ? choose a search system and step 4 ? formulate a query of Marchionini?s information-seeking model forms the basis of the theoretical framework, which is supplemented with Soergel and Katz. Qualitative interviews with eight Academic librarians were conducted and analyzed in order to gather empirical facts.

The purpose of this master thesis is to investigate how librarians working in academic libraries are experiencing the reference situation from a pedagogical point of view, by applying a theoretical framework consisting of learning strategies and their different characteristics, to qualitative interviews. Other goals are to elucidate the fact that learning takes place every day at libraries during the reference situation and that this work must be seen as ?one of the most important activities that takes place at the library?, using the words from one of the interviewed librarians, but also to make place for more discussions regarding pedagogic and library work. This is done by posing questions about knowledge, learning, information literacy, communication, the reference encounter, the roles of the librarian, policy and also architectural aspects of the reference situation. The interviews were taped, transcribed and categorized according to the earlier mentioned areas of interest.

The aim of this Master thesis is, from a sociocultural perspective, to investigate the views the teaching librarians at Södertörn University Library (SHB) have on learning, information literacy, and their own pedagogical role, and how their views affect user education and their ideas about the future of user education.The research questions used were: How do the teaching librarians view learning? How is this view reflected in their work with user education? How do the teaching librarians envisage user education in the future, and how do they work to reach that goal?Five semi-structured interviews were conducted with the teaching librarians at SHB. The interviews were then analysed using qualitative content analysis.The results of the study show that the teaching librarians at SHB share a sociocultural view on learning, and take a communicative oriented approach to user education. They believe that communication and interaction support learning, and in the classroom they stimulate discussions both between librarian and student, and between the students themselves. In the future, they hope for improved collaboration between librarians and academic staff, and that user education will become a natural element of the curriculum..

Librarians like to think that libraries contribute substantially to the progress of research. However, libraries still seem to have serious problems getting integrated in their parent organization on equal terms with other parts of that organization. The degree of integration of the library is thus the main topic of this thesis and the purpose is to examine how the interaction between librarians and scientists is formed and can be developed. That issue leads to concrete questions concerning what part librarians play in the scientists work and which factors influence the cooperation or lack of cooperation. We have chosen, for reasons of comparison, to make two case studies; one is a branch of a university library and the other is a library in a large pharmaceutical company.

This essay is about leadership in libraries within the academic world, i.e. leadership in research libraries. To place our survey in a context we begin the theoretical review with a chapter about organisation theory. We dont think its possible to separate the leader from the organisation so we wanted to describe the organisation and its effect on the leadership. The next theoretical section is about leadership research.