This bachelor’s thesis aims to examine the librarians' Competitive Intelligence (CI) practices and their views on the matter. Today, easy access to information makes greater demands on librarians’ and users’ knowledge regarding source criticism. Current trends in information services that develop through technological aids require strategies regarding CI to meet users’ information needs. Swedish libraries implement similar practices in their job description, where most of the information gathering is done by regional librarians. Though public libraries could benefit from a more structural conformation of CI definitions and execution, it seems to be of low priority. The research questions are: “How does CI take place among professionals in public library activities?” and “How do professionals in public libraries estimate the need for further development concerning CI within the organization?” Surveys were constructed with both opened-ended and closed questions and sent out to 40 randomized public libraries in Sweden. The empirical data was analyzed using a multimethod research containing both qualitative and quantitative content analysis. The thesis uses a theoretical analysis tool consisting of Ola Pilerots’ translation of Marcia Bates’s model “Modes of Information Seeking”. It was used to assist in coding the data and then analyzing them to get a better understanding of CI as an information practice. The findings indicate that CI occurs on a self-responsibility level with little consideration for scheduling, and librarians seem to wish for more structure and time regarding this activity.

The purpose of this Bachelor thesis is to investigate which rolesthe mobile library has to its users in a small community in Sweden.To reach this purpose I have focused on the following two researchquestions:• Which are the different functions, social, cultural, educational orinformation-based, that the mobile library offers its users andwhich of these are used in reality?• What purposes are there for the mobile library and how it is usedby it’s visitors?To answer these questions I have interviewed four users of amobile library and I have held e-mail interviews with librarians incharge of a mobile library as well as the head of the department ofculture and peoples health in the community. As a base for myanalyse I have also used a pilot study which I performed earlier inthe spring of 2011.My theoretical framework is based on the model of the publiclibrary’s different roles made by Marianne Andersson and DorteSkot-Hansen.The result of this study show’s that a mobile library isn’t verydifferent from a permanently located public library. The fourdifferent functions all exist, wholly or partly, in the mobile library. / Program: Bibliotekarie

This essay is about the mobile library in three communities of a district. Interviews with the help of research questions are used as a data collection method to gather information on how the mobile library works, which possibilities for evolution it has to better satisfy their users’ needs and which place the mobile library occupies in its context to the main library and its branches. As a theoretical background the work of Andersson & Skot-Hansen is used to illuminate the mobile library’s different usages, determined by four centres, the centre of culture, the centre of knowledge, the centre of information and the centre of social interaction. Two of three communities will be buying new bookmobiles for the mobile library in 2018 and with the new equipment the mobile library will be able to offer additional services. The mobile library is no longer only an instrument to deliver books and other media, it grows to a multiroom with multiple opportunities, able to host cultural and educational events while offering digital services, information and a meeting place. Faced with closing down library branches the mobile library is either part of the centralisation process of the main library or part of the decentralisation process of the main library filling its own roll in the work towards its users. As part of the decentralisation process the mobile library is considered a library branch, not stationary but mobile, one of its many advantages in the work to deliver its services directly to users anywhere.