This Masters Thesis is about the Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs and the arms length principle. The principle is used to explain the separation of power between two parts with a common interest. The main purpose is to elucidate if, and if so in what way, the arms length principle can be used to explain the relation between the National Council for Cultural Affairs and the Ministry of Education and Culture, i.e. the Swedish government, but also to examine the structures of power and relations within the Council. In the thesis we show that in the field of cultural policy the content of the arm lengths principle varies due to the many interpretations of the meaning. From these results we find three areas to analyze. They are the Councils tasks, the organization of the board and other structures in the Council and finally the budget process. The areas of investigation are the aspects of distance or closeness trough formal- and informal influence, and through aspects of political control or independence. This is done with Olof Peterssons method constructed to analyze power between and within institutions. The theoretical framework is found in Jørn Langsteds definition of arms length principle and Harry Hillman-Chartrand and Claire McCaugheys typology of state support for the arts and culture. The main conclusion is that the arms length principle is a useful tool to describe the relations between the Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs and the Ministry of Education and Culture. But, mainly for particular areas and aspects of power relations and not as an overall explanation. The Councils position can be described as being in the middle on the scale between political autonomy and state control. Finally, we argue that the principle is best manifested in the Council itself through &quot;reciprocal power relations&quot; that the representatives of Cultural life and state political power confronts. / <p>DIK Kulturfackets uppsatsstipendium 2006.</p><p>Uppsatsnivå: D</p>

The object of this explorative theoretical study is to compare similarities in three perspectives for evaluation of credibility. The perspectives are the historical method source-criticism, cognitive authority and domain analysis. These perspectives, regarded as intellectual tools for critical thinking in a process of information seeking, by asking questions about credibility related to the social and theoretical context of the intellectual background, can give support in articulating which documents that gives a specific and essential answer to a question. In this sense credibility is seen as a qualitative aspect of relevance. Patrick Wilson argues that we can attain some critical independence towards cognitive authorities and the literature by investigating the social and theoretical topography of a field. Birger Hjørlands domain analysis, I argue, is a more systematic way to pose these kinds of questions. Source-criticism has in the examples investigated here the historians Lauritz and Curt Weibull in the 1910s and Rolf Torstendahl in the 1960s mostly been used for empirical proof of true or correct statements, but it also addresses questions of credibility. A source is related to a question with theoretical connotations. Both source-criticism and domain analysis can articulate these connotations by shedding light on aspects of the intellectual background. Taken together in a comparative and rhetorical approach these perspectives can articulate reasons for judgement of which documents that contains credible knowledge. Source-criticism is suitable for handling specific and empirical aspects of credibility, cognitive authority connects aspects of status and relevance to social practice and domain analysis can give orientation on different theoretical positions within a knowledge domain. / Uppsatsnivå: D

The aim of this thesis was to describe the services offered to students with dyslexia, and from a service- and quality perspective describe how the consumers of these services experienced the supplied services. Dyslexia refers to certain problems with the written language. With the demand for students in higher education to accumulate much knowledge through reading, this becomes a question of vital importance. A qualitative descriptive approach was used, and a case study was conducted. The case study covered &apos;Student support&apos; at the University of Borås and how dyslectic students at the university experienced the help from &apos;Student support&apos;. Interviews with dyslectic students, as well as the coordinator of &apos;Student support&apos;, were carried out. As a theoretical foundation a model for experienced service quality was used. The models main components was related to: people, process and physical quality. The informants of the study experienced a sense of release when diagnosed, as it made earlier school problems understandable, indicating the importance of early diagnosis. The informants experienced their dyslexia to be an obstacle in their studies. Time to read literature was one significant problem. The result indicates the importance of different kind of help for dyslectic students. Help from classmates and family proved to be essential. &apos;Student support&apos; was seen as vital to be successful in the studies, especially with providing talking books. All informants was not familiar with the help &apos;Student support&apos; could offer, indicating the importance of information about help offering. The result also indicates the importance of librarians attitude to service and understanding for dyslectic students needs. / Uppsatsnivå: D

The aim of the thesis is to study young peoples, defined as boys and girls between 14 and 16 years old, attitudes to library in two municipalities. Notwithstanding the fact that young people, and children, often is given priority in library work, the reality often seems to be another. Attitudes are founded primarily in childhood and therefore it is of great importance to examine how young people regard libraries. Besides studying former research about young people and libraries that has been performed on library and information science, we also have been using concepts and theories from social science. We give a brief outline of youth research and its development and look at official records and legislation to see if and in what context young people are mentioned. Our empirical data consists of an opinion poll made by using a questionnaire which was carried out in two senior level schools in two municipalities. The result of our study is that most of the young people consider libraries important and their priorities are books and computers. A remarkable high percentage of them rarely or ever visit the library. The interior is vitally important for how the young people experience the library in its entirety. Furthermore, the stock of media is not fulfilling their desires and needs. Our conclusion is that attitudes to a great extent are acquired by the actual experience. This is formed by the structural relationship between youth culture and the established culture and the fact that young people and adults belong to different generations. To create a dialogue built on mutual understanding and respect between those who work in libraries and young people is considered a necessity to change the negative attitudes. Reference groups are seen as an effective tool to accomplish this. / Uppsatsnivå: D

This masters thesis takes the providers perspective on public library story times for children. The main questions are: What perspectives can the providers have? How does the perspective affect the content and how is the story time drawn up? Five story time providers were interviewed about the purpose of their story times, the methods they used and the content they chose. A model with four criteria was used to analyze the result of the interviews. The criteria were: adult criteria, consideration of the childrens view, pedagogical criteria and literary/story time criteria. These criteria form together four different possible perspectives on the public library story time. The providers perspective on public library story time does, in this thesis, have an effect on the purpose, the content, the methods and how the story time is drawn up. The story time content is affected by the purpose and methods chosen are also affected by the purpose or by the providers behaviour. / Uppsatsnivå: D

We have carried out a study of a classification system for the Swedish collection at The Royal Library in Stockholm from 1887. It was printed in 50 copies. The constructor, Bernhard Lundstedt, and his colleagues used it as guidance in lack of a catalogue. We regard it a local classification system. Little research has been done on old classification systems, but Francis Miksa points out the importance of examining them. The aim of this thesis is to present and describe the system, and to contribute to the knowledge thereof. Moreover, we aim to place the system in its contexts: in the library and its staff, and in the surrounding society. The study shows that the system has 56 main headings, starting with bibliography and the humanities eg theology and literature and ending with science eg technology, mathematics and medicine. The headings are divided into several sub hierarchies. Common subheadings are periodicals, treaties and societies, followed by subheadings about subjects. The hierarchy sometimes ends in an enumeration of material. The progress in a heading tends to go from the general to the specific. A common division is into a foreign and a Swedish class. Moreover, the study shows the resemblance to the Swedish SAB-system, which was first published in 1921. This thesis also points out that the system was not constructed in a vacuum, but in strong connection with late nineteenth century society. / Uppsatsnivå: D

This masters thesis investigates how the Swedish county libraries relate to equality between men and women. The thesis treats the county library both as a place of work and as a part of the national library network. One of the reasons why this study focuses on county libraries is because of their special position in the Swedish library organisation as a link between the national policy and the public libraries. The analysis in the study is based on theories that argue masculinity and femininity as social constructions, and therefore can be affected by a different type of conduct. Data was gathered using qualitative questionnaires combined with some quantitative elements that were used to gain fundamental facts regarding the distribution of employees between the sexes and the existence of equality policies. The conclusions drawn were that many county libraries did not have special policies for equality questions. The strategies for including equality in the daily work with the public libraries were often based on separating the sexes even though the main purpose with the strategies was to eliminate the differences between men and women. Generally the librarians were positive to include equality as a part of their work. The main reason that the county libraries did not work with equality was because the public libraries did not request that type of assistance. / Uppsatsnivå: D

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. Women read more than men and they read fiction by male and female authors. Men are in favour of male authors. Women read more genres than men do and many women prefer reading realistic stories about peoples tragic fortunes. Most of the respondents read fiction for entertainment, for emotional and/or existential causes and for general knowledge. We observe that there are both differences and similarities between the two groups. The majority of the respondents obtain books at the school- and/or public library but many of them borrow books from friends or buy fiction in bookstores. / Uppsatsnivå: D

In Sweden most public libraries give users access to databases. These databases are sometimes possible to reach outside the library by internet at any time and this provides a change for the library and the society. Librarians function as change agents when they give access to databases and when databases are introduced to users. However, reports show that the use of databases, especially those in English, is not high in reference work. This study aims at analysing attitudes of librarians to access and use of databases on and by public libraries. Are there role conflicts or other barriers that may block the use and availability of databases? To study and discuss reference librarians and their role as change agents the theory of attitudes in diffusion of innovations by Everett Rogers is used. The interviews with seven librarians in this study show that they are positive to the use of databases both in their reference work and for the users themselves, though some barriers and role conflicts can be identified. For example librarians can have insufficient knowledge of how to use databases or how to make them useful in their reference work. Factors that might increase their willingness to totally adopt databases could be a greater amount of relative advantage, compatibility, observability and trialability but less of complexity, as these concepts are described in Everett Rogers theory about attitudes in diffusion of innovations. / Uppsatsnivå: D

This thesis discusses main problems associated with dictionary-based Cross-Language Information Retrieval as lexical and translational ambiguity of query terms, translation of compounds and phrases, dictionary limitation. The purpose of the study is to investigate how query structure influences the effectiveness of CLIR regarding performance of three query types: original query, unstructured query and structured query. Query structuring refers to the application of #syn-operator to group query terms. The study comprises an experiment that was performed in the InQuery IR system with TrecUta database that contains 550,000 news articles from different American newspapers. 24 topics were used for the experiment. The effectiveness of three types of query structure is compared at different Document Cut-off Value levels, maximal DCV= 100. The measure used is average precision. Binary relevance situation, where the three relevance degrees 1, 2, and 3 have been merged into one, is applied. The results show that dictionary-based query translation without the use of structure significantly decreases the effectiveness of information retrieval while query structuring through synonym sets shows to be a simple and effective method, which allows the reduction of the effects of translation ambiguity and the improvement of the performance of CLIR-queries. The results reveal that the performance can nearly reach the same level as the original queries. / Uppsatsnivå: D