There are many research studies about integration processes but none about user education for immigrants. The aim of this Bachelor´s thesis is to examine how a library in Sweden contributes to the integration of immigrants and how user education for immigrants, organized by the library, is experienced by librarians and students. Diaz theory of five different ways to study integration is applied to the material concerning students’ and librarians’ experiences of user education. Students want more extensive choice of literature in their native language and even more information about Swedish society. The librarians believe they can help immigrants even more in their integration process, but it is difficult because of the limited resources. The students also request activities that can be useful when seeking employment. From the interviews, we can see that the library is working mostly with the social and subjective integration, while they don’t work so much with housing integration.

My purpose with this paper was to examine how four of the administrative managers at health and care, at the municipality perceive their communicative roles and how that affects the municipality. I also wanted to examine how a communicative leadership can be expressed and what kind of support a communicative leader needs. I used a qualitative method and semi structured interview to perform my study. I have chosen to analyze my results from the study with the help of theories about the difference between information and communication, how the perception of communication and information has changed over time, how different ideal types of communicative leadership is experienced and what the requirements are for a good communicative leadership. The results of the study show that the perceptioncommunication in relation to information differs between the administrative managers. The managers mainly communicate with the employees in group. If the communication concerns the daily job, the managers choose to handle it themselves. They all think that a consistent and professional communication favors the municipality in whole.The budget and annual report are mentioned as fundamentatools to communicate goals and visions to employees.

The aim of this master thesis is to examine discourses and practices in the handling of materials from the ex-treme right in the Swedish national collection at Kungliga biblioteket (the Swedish national library). Questions posed in this study concern what practices have been used in the handling of the material, the discourse sur-rounding the material and its relation to power structures. The source documents in this study come from the library’s archive records between the years 2000 and 2010. As a complement, the study also uses correspond-ence with librarians active during the time period as well as an interview with an expert on the Swedish extreme right. This study uses Foucauldian discourse analysis as a method and searches for discursive patterns and power structures in the source documents. The essay sees a complex progression in how materials from the extreme right have been handled throughout the time period 2000-2010. In summary, the researched material contains two discursive patterns. Although on opposite terms, they can both be linked to the restrictions of the material. During the time period, a separate collection was set up for extremist material, a collection which is now taken apart. This study argues that “extremism” is a relative term by definition and therefor unsuitable for labelling any material in the long run. This study is a two-year master‘s thesis in Library and Information Science at Uppsala University.

The main purpose of this bachelors’ thesis is to add knowledge regarding what strategies students in vocational schools use when assessing information found on the Internet, and their own view of their capabilities regarding this. I also intend to add further to the discussion regarding these students’ usage of libraries available to them. I examined what sources they use, and what criteria students use to pick, or avoid, certain sources. I also examined how they rated their own assessment of information found on the Internet. I conducted a quantitative study spanning three schools, with altogether 42 answers to my poll where most of the questions were multiple choice ones, and a few open questions. After this I analyzed the answers acquired by finding patterns in the students’ answers. The result shows that the participating students have a certain capability when it comes to assessing the value of sources, while their own judgment of their capabilities showed they thought they had shown quite the prowess in assessing information. The participating students preferred search engines when searching for information. The main strategies for judging what source to use were to examine which sources fit the assignment or contained information that they judged unreasonable. They also looked at several sources to compare information between them. They looked more at the sites’ appearance, than the texts’ author.

Due to the fact that worrisome geopolitical conditions and rapid technological development may have changed the tasks performed in public libraries, the purpose of this survey has been to investigate the professional identities demanded on the Swedish library market today. In order to achieve this, a qualitative content analysis - based on the seven librarian identities recorded by Ørom and Schreiber - was conducted by recently published job advertisements. The result shows that all seven identities are present, and that the so-called social worker identity is the most frequent one. This could be due to the fact that some of the public libraries have been forced to assume more outward and socially conscious social roles as a result of the aforementioned geopolitical conditions. The study also shows that there are differences between which of the identities can be said to belong to the various general library types. The breakdown could be due to the fact that some of the profession specialized in the technical parts of the profession, while another assumed a more general intermediary role.

The purpose of this study was to test Lotka’s law of scientific publication productivity using the methodology outlined by Pao (1985), in the field of Library and Information Studies (LIS). Lotka’s law has been sporadically tested in the field over the past 30+ years, but the results of these studies are inconclusive due to the varying methods employed by the researchers. A data set of 1,856 citations that were found using the ISI Web of Knowledge databases were studied. The values of n and c were calculated to be 2.1 and 0.6418 (64.18%) respectively. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) one sample goodness-of-fit test was conducted at the 0.10 level of significance. The Dmax value is 0.022758 and the calculated critical value is 0.026562. It was determined that the null hypothesis stating that there is no difference in the observed distribution of publications and the distribution obtained using Lotka’s and Pao’s procedure could not be rejected. This study finds that literature in the field of library and Information Studies does conform to Lotka’s law with reliable results. As result, Lotka’s law can be used in LIS as a standardized means of measuring author publication productivity which will lead to findings that are comparable on many levels (e.g., department, institution, national). Lotka’s law can be employed as an empirically proven analytical tool to establish publication productivity benchmarks for faculty and faculty librarians. Recommendations for further study include (a) exploring the characteristics of the high and low producers; (b) finding a way to successfully account for collaborative contributions in the formula; and, (c) a detailed study of institutional policies concerning publication productivity and its impact on the appointment, tenure and promotion process of academic librarians.

How does teacher students describe their preparation during their teacher education programmes so that they in the future are able to support their students’ information literacy? The latest curriculum, Lgr 11 of the Swedish elementary school have increased the demands on students’ digital abilities. These abilities largely include searching for and selecting information. Students should also develop a critical approach to information. The aim of the study is to contribute with knowledge about the participants experiences of preparation during the education in order to develop their future elementary school students’ information literacy. In this study, information literacy is described as the ability to define information needs and find and critically evaluate suitable sources in order to then be able to use the information in an adequate manner. Information literacy is studied from a sociocultural perspective where information searching is linked to different social contexts. Qualitative interviews were conducted with six teacher students. Socio-cultural theory has been helpful in the content analysis of the empirical material. The results show that the participants describe themselves as secure digital users. Nevertheless, they do not feel that they are sufficiently prepared from their teacher education programmes to meet their future students’ information literacy and needs. They furthermore wish for theory to be linked in a more concrete way to practice during the education.

English title: ”They occupy our comfortable couches and armchairs” - the library staff’s view on problem patrons. The purpose of this study was to examine the views of problem patrons among staff at swedish public libraries to see if there was an overall view. We also wanted to look into which feelings these patrons bring up from the staffs perspective and to whom the problem patron is a problem for. We sent out an questionnaire to employees in public libraries and got responses from over 20 different counties. As a theoretical framework we used social constructionism and the results were analysed by using a modified version of Berger and Luckmanns Social construction of reality model.   The results of this study identifies nine different categories of problem patrons and the most common feelings these patrons contribute to were frustration and discomfort. Our results also shows that the problem patron can be a problem to both the employees at the library and to other library visitors, but not always at the same time, in the same situations, and under the same conditions. Whether a patron becomes viewed as a problem or not depends according to this study on society and library norms, which we try enlight in our analysis and discussion section.

This case study examines three newly renovated children’s sections at the city libraries in Borås, Göteborg and Malmö. The aim is to investigate, from a spatial and socio-cultural perspective, what characterizes modern children’s sections at public libraries. The research questions look at the intentions behind the constructions of the spaces, how concepts like child participation and perspectives on childhood have been used, how the children interact with one another and the room itself, and finally how the librarians and other staff members’ work environments have been affected by the changes. I have conducted six qualitative interviews with librarians and other staff members at the libraries in question and combined the interviews with observations of the children’s sections. The material is analyzed with the theoretical frameworks from several research fields like human geography. The main theoretic tool is the four-space model. This is used to place the testimonies and observation findings in four abstract spaces; inspiration space, learning space, meeting space and the performative space. The result shows that all three libraries have based their projects heavily on children’s play and child participation. The library spaces have all been designed with a child perspective in mind and they are colourful and creative for the children to discover. The staffs have had to come to terms with the changes in their work environment and maybe we have to revalue what it means to work at a children’s library. This is a two years master’s thesis in Library and Information Science.

This thesis has examined regional and municipal cultural policy documents and public library policy documents. The purpose of the study was to examine and discus which preconceptions about the public library the policy documents contains. The chosen method and theory to achieve this purpose was discourse analysis, new institutional theory was applied in order to discuss the preconceptions that the discourse analysis made visible. The regional and municipal cultural policy documents did not mention the public library as much as expected. The findings from the analysis show that the discourses identified in the policy documents were relatively similar. The discourses found in the regional cultural policy documents were: the literary discourse, the multifunctional discourse and the societal development discourse. Only the multifunctional discourse was identified in the municipal cultural policy documents. In the public library policy documents four discourses where identified: the literary discourse, the information-conveying discourse, the multifunctional discourse and the societal development discourse. The preconception that where made visible during the discourse analysis can be considered as a result of reproduction of other policy documents from the cultural policy field. According to institutional theory this can be viewed as isomorfism, and the policy documents are used to achieve legitimacy. In order to survive the regions, municipalities and public libraries reproduce values, norms and demands from the cultural policy field. During the analysis it became clear that there were two different logics present in the cultural and library policy documents: a market based logic and library logic. This is a two years master´s thesis in Library and Informations Science.