The purpose of this Masters thesis is to investigate upper secondary school librarians conceptions of fiction mediation. By using a phenomenographic method, the different conceptions of the specific phenomena, how the librarians conceptualise their work with mediation of fiction, are made clear. The aim of the method is not to study what fiction mediation is constituted of, but rather how upper secondary school librarians understand it. Qualitative interviews were held with eight upper secondary school librarians about their conceptions of their working tasks, the meaning of fiction for youths, reading promotion, inspiration to purchase of fiction, free voluntary reading and if the importance of fiction has changed over time. The results showed that the upper secondary school librarians conceptualise their working tasks as both changeable and repeatable. They also conceptualise their working tasks educational and they find them comparable with teaching. The librarians think that fiction is very important for youths even if the youths dont believe so themselves. Some upper secondary school librarians conceptualise that they are working with reading promotion and some librarians consider that they dont work with any specific reading promotion at all. When more thorough questions are asked about how fiction is promoted to youths, the librarians say that they are having book talks, reading projects and author meetings. Students and teachers are the most significant inspiration sources when it comes too purchase of fiction. Almost all the librarians consider that free voluntary reading is the best for students, but some of the librarians also think that prescribed fiction is important. All the upper secondary school librarians conceptualise that the meaning of fiction has changed over time but some think that reading skills in youths has diminished. On the other hand, some librarians conceptualise that fiction has became more important after working together with teachers in reading projects at the upper secondary school. / Uppsatsnivå: D

This thesis analyses how friendship between children is described in four Swedish childrens books, published in 1995-2001 and recommended in Barnbokstipset, which is used in libraries for recommending books. Today there are many childrens books that describe various aspects of childrens everyday lives and these books can have an influence on the children who read them. But I found that there has not been much research about how friendship is described in childrens books, although much has been written about the importance of social relationships with peers for childrens lives and development. I analyze the books one by one with the help of a number of questions and categories that I have constructed beforehand. In the analysis I apply Zick Rubins theory of two different stages in childrens understanding of friendship and William Corsaros theory of interactive space which deals with who is allowed to join in games and friendships and who is not allowed to do so and how this is played out. Some of the conclusions that can be drawn from the analysis is that most of the described friendships contains a lot of emotions and that problems in the relationships are frequently described. The books are to a great extent about being able to get access to the desired interactive space. / Uppsatsnivå: D

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to make an outline of different methods and theories within the field of bibliometrics and critically review their strengths and weaknesses. The author studied literature that discussed bibliometric methods and theories. The number of empirical studies that are based on bibliometric methods and theories are numerous and where principally excluded, but some empirical studies were included as part of the argumentation for and against different methods and theories. The author first gives an outline of which methods and theories there are and describes their different strengths and weaknesses. Citation analysis has many different fields of application such as information retrieval, mapping science, evaluative studies and monitoring literature. There are also many new areas of use such as the use of citation analysis in an electronic environment, then called link analysis. Within the theoretical research there is discussion weather or not there is a need for a general theory of citation. The result of the review shows that citation analysis has great flaws and theoretical research within this field is problematic, since there are many factors that affect citations, which makes it impossible to identify and quantify them all. There is a need for qualitative aspects and basic research. The goal of theoretical research should not be to find a general theory of citation. / Uppsatsnivå: D

The aim with this masters thesis is to investigate how gender is presented in Swedish picture books, in order to give librarians and other actors in the field knowledge about what kind of books they supply impressionable children with. I investigate if and how the changes concerning gender-equality in the Swedish society during the last 25 years are reflected in childrens literature, and compare how men and women are portrayed in four books from the early 1980s with four books from the 2000s. My study is delimited to three aspects of character formation, introduced by Maria Nikolajeva: description of psychology, actions and relations to other characters. It is carried through by consultation of Yvonne Hirdmans theory of how men and women are held apart and that the man in this relation constitutes the norm as well as Nikolajevas list of typical male and female characteristics. By reading and interpreting the chosen books, I analyse both text and pictures. The results indicate that the changes concerning gender-equality in the society are indeed reflected in the analysed books. There have been advancements made towards an increased equality, but there are still a lot to be made until equality is complete in these depictions. Among the changes I can mention that women today are ascribed more power than in the 1980s and that the presence of female characters has been largely increased. Among the aspects still to be changed, the stereotypical descriptions of supporting characters are a prominent one. / Uppsatsnivå: D

Based on a review of literature on evalution of public activities and in purpose to introduce amore general framework, this study describes a picture of the concept, context, motives,strategies, use and actors in Evaluation as these are experienced outside the field of libraryand information. The background is the increased need for" evaluations in public libaries and aneed for new LIS knowledge about it. The reviewed literature has its origin in differentdisciplinary contexts and the study include contributions from policy studies, sociologi,education research, business administration, philosophy and anthropology. The focus, though,is not placed upon differences in the literature but on similarities.The review is organised in six parts. In the first part a presentation is given of how evaluationsare conceptualized and its meaning in a historical perspective. In the second the focus is uponthe context of public descision making, implementation and public programming. Different ·purpuses of evaluation is discussed in the third part followed by a description of strategies andmodels in the fourth. Issues of evaluation use is discussed in part five and finally is a presentationof those actors of particular-importance in evaluations given in part six. In the reviewedliterature the -author finds some general patterns, who are assembled and described in acomprehensive discussion. In the contusion some claimes are made about the nature ofevaluation. One claim is that evaluations are of great complexity and given several functions.This complexity is explained by the fact that evaluative activities are of increased concern andimportence for numeorous actors and their relevance for many fields of practice.Future research is suggested to focus on the role of evaluation in the perspective of politicalandadminstrative governance, program change and development, scientific knowledge andin the perspective of negotiations and communication in social and political conflicts.

In information retrieval there is a problem with ambiguous words. To solve this problem word sense disambiguation WSD is used. Few studies combining information retrieval and word sense disambiguation have been conducted with Swedish words. The purpose of this thesis has been divided in two. The first purpose was to examine Swedish information retrieval and disambiguation in the query phase. The second purpose was to compare the disambiguation between automatic and manual expansion. We chose a number of topics from the GP_HDINF test collection in Query Performance Analyser QPA. The topics we chose had to have more than ten relevant documents so that expansion would be possible. According to the rules of the automatic expansion we were to choose relations in the following order; synonyms, hyponyms, hypernyms. If such relations did not exist the topic was rejected. This left us with 14 topics. We made a baseline query with inflections of the Swedish words. Our baseline query was expanded once automatically using the sense that the Lesk algorithm chose from the Swedish WordNet and once manually by the authors. We compared precision and recall from our baseline with precision and recall from both the automatic and the manual expansions. Our study shows that the Lesk algorithm performs 60 % correct disambiguation and that manual expansion performs better than automatic expansion. The difference between automatic WSD and manual WSD is negligible and we suggest the use of automatic WSD to overcome the problems in IR because it saves the user a lot of time. / Uppsatsnivå: D

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to make a critical analysis of Journal Impact Factor JIF. JIF is today the most widespread quantitative measure for evaluating scientific journals. Although it is internationally used and is considered authoritarian many problems have been observed. This has led to that the validity of JIF has been questioned. To identify JIFs limitations the following issues have been raised: Which are the problems with citation analysis? What criticisms have been directed towards Journal Impact Factor as a measure for evaluating scientific journals? The theoretical framework consists of theories about citation behaviour and a discussion about the characteristics of a scientific journal. In order to answer our questions a compilation of earlier and contemporary research about citation analysis and JIF has been conducted. The result has been divided into two parts; citation analysis and JIF. Since JIF is a measure based on citation rates, an understanding of the problems surrounding citation analysis is a necessity to get a complete picture of JIF and its limitations. In the part about JIF an identification and discussion about the specific problems surrounding the measure takes place. The result shows that the main problems concerning citation analysis are that there exist different citer motivations and citation practice among scholars and disciplines which makes it hard to draw any conclusions about what citations may represent. The main problems concerning JIF are that some journals are favoured because of publication language, publication rate, document types, audience and the research process within disciplines. Despite its problems JIF can be regarded as a valid measure for evaluating scientific journals. / Uppsatsnivå: D

This Masters thesis is concerned with the complex planning process of setting up a citizen bureau in a public library. The aim is to find out how citizen bureaux are designed and to suggest a simplified model of strategic planning. The planning process is studied from a business perspective in the library context, and this perspective is also used to study citizen bureaux and their written plans elsewhere. A combination of qualitative methods are used: observations, focus group discussions and interviews. Observations in the public library showed a great need for an environmental analysis as well as structure to the planning process. In two focus group discussions a Critical Success Factor CSF analysis was used. A CSF analysis was considered a useful tool which meets the need for consensus in public organizations. The results of the three interviews showed that the citizen bureaux are all of the same type, namely integrated information centres with an increased service level as their main aim. The differences between them were due to demographic and contextual reasons. The proposed simplified strategic planning model consists of four activities: an environmental analysis, strategic focus, implementation and evaluation. The CSF model is suggested as a tool for environmental analysis activities as well as for addressing important factors in setting a strategic focus. The study shows that the model needs to address the specific conditions and needs of public organizations and suggests further research to clarify its function and possible advantages. / Uppsatsnivå: D

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to investigate how students at an upper secondary school for adults use school and public library when searching for information for school assignments. The focus in this investigation is on the feelings and experiences of the process of the information seeking and use. The focus is also on the students experiences of school and public libraries and the help they receive from them in learning. The method used is focus groups interviews. Two groups were interviewed. The results of the study show that these students use the school library as a place where they can search the Internet, use computers and work in groups. They often feel that the library staff is not available because there are always too many students asking questions. The experiences from the public library are that it is easier to get help there even if you must wait your turn. The librarians are often so eager to help that some students feel a need to tell them that they will do the search themselves. The results also show that students with an immigrant background find it difficult to find the proper information for their school assignments as it takes longer for them to read through information and decide if the information is useful or not. Sometimes they also have difficulties to follow the teacher, and because of that they can lose their confidence in their school work. / Uppsatsnivå: D

The purpose of this Masters thesis is to examine the performance of queries that are expanded by synonyms and hyponyms from Svenskt OrdNät, the Swedish version of the Princeton WordNet. Four different types of queries were constructed: a baseline query S1, the baseline query expanded with synonyms S2, the baseline query expanded with hyponyms S3 and finally the baseline query expanded with the synonyms and hyponyms used in S2 and S3. The terms for expansion were picked by hand. The queries were executed in the Query Performance Analyser QPA, a tool used in IR education and in experimental IR research for analysing and comparing the performance of individual queries. 20 topics from the test collection GP_HDINF were chosen for the experiment. The four query types were analyzed with regard to precision and recall. The experimental results suggest that expansion with synonyms is the most effective of the four query types, since this query type performs the highest average recall, with only a slight decline in precision. However, there is no great difference in performance between the different query types. / Uppsatsnivå: D