The subject of this two year Master's thesis in Library and Information Science is the information practices of illiterate immigrants in everyday life. The purpose is to examine how immigrants seek, identify, understand and value information sources and information, and how the practices have changed with their arrival in Sweden. It furthermore focuses on the barriers that illiterate immigrants meet in accessing and understanding information. It moreover investigates the strategies they use to overcome them. For this purpose twelve qualitative research interviews were carried out, with illiterate immigrants as well as with service providers. The theoretical concepts of the essay is information practices, which means that the information process is within a context, and information poverty, that people in different context do not have adequate and equal access to information and information sources. Using McKenzie's model of information practices, the essay concludes that illiterate immigrants are active in their information process, especially when they interact with information. The most commonly used information practice is to seek out and ask for help in their social network. They use service providers to explain written information. In addition to actively seeking out people to help them, they use a variety of information practices. They use Internet on their smartphones. Some of them use a translator app to translate letters and communicate with others. They use Facebook and watch TV. They also use other visual sources. Their information practices function as strategies to cope with barriers connected to illiteracy. They utilize their social network that possesses writing and reading skills to help them read and explain. Other strategies are to use numbers and to learn things by heart. Although the illiterate immigrants use a variety of practices and strategies, they still do not get adequate and equal access to information and therefore can be called information poor. Their social network is a resource, but it can also be a limitation. They risk lacking information about intangible things. But they do not, opposed to Chatman's theory, keep their needs concealed. One participant differed from the others in this aspect, since he expressed an unwillingness to ask. He was also troubled by his illiteracy. He perceived himself as being more limited because of it. The interpretation of this is that he lives in a more literate world than the other participants. Therefore is he able to realize what he lacks. It is important to give illiterate immigrants adequate and equal information. This essay thus suggests that institutions seek to adapt their information services to the practices and strategies that the group acquires and uses.

With the technological development of the last decades, an increasing number of genealogists are carrying out their research online. The purpose of this master’s thesis is to examine how and why genealogists' information behavior has been influenced by the use of online services for genealogy. Using a conceptual model of genealogists' information behavior as theoretical basis for the study, I examine how the use of online services affect genealogists’ search process, what information they are looking for and what information resources they use. Data is collected by seven qualitative interviews with experienced genealogists.The interviews indicate that online services have not completely taken over the genealogists’ search for information. Genealogists still went to physical repositories for a number of reasons. However, all participants in the study agreed that their visits to physical repositories and their use of physical records had declined since they began to use online services. The search for information was perceived to have become easier and more convenient with online services, although participants also acknowledged the risks of misleading information. Online services for genealogy also seem to have an influence on the contact between genealogists, especially on international contacts. This, together with the increasing research on foreign material, indicates that genealogy has been internationalized as a result of the use of online services. To the extent that the use of online services affects genealogists' information behavior, it seems in large part to be a result of online services removing geographical barriers that previously influenced genealogists’ information behavior. This is a two years master’s thesis in Archival Science.

The purpose is to investigate the significance of social media for the user group exchange students. But also to investigate their central information needs and how they reason regarding criticism of the sources when it comes to using social media. I used theories regarding information needs from different researchers. I also used a model concerning information behaviors from Wilson. I used another theory concerning building blocks in social media by Kietzmann, Hermkens, MacCarthy and Silvestre. The study was conducted using semi-structured qualitative interviews with 8 exchange students. The questions asked are: Which are a few exchange student’s central information needs and what areas of usage are they related to? What social media do a few exchange students use and what activities do they usually carry out while using them? How do a few exchange students reason regarding criticism of the sources when it comes to social media use? My first conclusion is that social media has a significance impact when it comes to providing exchange students with information. Exchange students can also use social media to communicate with friends, family and relatives. My second conclusion is that exchange student’s information needs are increased. They need more information about news, cultural information and practical information. The last conclusion is that exchange students have good knowledge regarding criticism about the sources and when it comes to judging trustworthiness.

Introduction. Crises of faith are major cognitive gaps. This investigation discerns the function of information use in responding to crises of faith in addition to exploring the information-related context of the LDS church. Mormons are thought to have an especially difficult time disaffiliating from their religion yet depend heavily on information seeking and use for their decision to do so. Method. Narrative analysis of 34 episodes of the Mormon Stories podcast that delineate church members’ crises of faith. Episodes were transcribed and coded for analysis. Analysis. Qualitative analysis was performed on the data to uncover the applicability of Chatman’s theories of small worlds and information poverty to the LDS church as well as to reveal the sense-making process involved in a faith crisis. Results. It was possible to see elements of small worlds and information poverty in Mormonism. Information was found to be used in response to faith crises. Conclusion. The LDS church operates an extremely closed information environment which hinders members’ information seeking on church matters. Ex-Mormons use information in response to crisis by factising new knowledge in addition to deciding to disaffiliate from the faith or from religion in general. This is a two years Master’s thesis in Library and Information Science. / Introduktion. Individers tvivel om deras religiösa identitet är svåröverkomliga kognitiva klyftor. Den här uppsatsen utreder informationsanvändningens roll i bemötandet av tvivel. Ytterliga utforskas Mormonkyrkans informationskontext. Mormoner anses ha det speciellt svårt att lämna sin religion men är högst beroende av informationssökning- och användning inför deras beslut. Metod. Narrativ analys av 34 avsnitt av podcasten Mormon Stories som behandlar medlemmars tvivel om sin tro. Avsnitt transkriberades samt kodades inför analysen. Analys. Källmaterialet analyserades med kvalitativa metoder för att skönja om Chatmans teorier om small worlds och information poverty kan appliceras till Mormonkyrkan. Utöver detta analyserades tvivlens gång med Dervins teori om sense-making. Resultat. Aspekter av small worlds och information poverty kunde urskiljas inom Mormonkyrkan. Medlemmarna använde information för att både bemöta och lösa frågor kring tvivel. Slutsats. Mormonkyrkan företar sig en extremt konservativ syn på information vilket som hindrar medlemmars informationssökning. Före detta mormoner använder information för att hantera sin kris genom att skapa nya fakta om världen samt genom att ta beslutet att avsäga sig medlemskap eller religiositet i allmänhet.

Few studies have been done about information seeking among students of Cinema Studies. Cinema Studies is a unique area, which also requires information seeking in the form of moving images. What information resources do the students of Cinema Studies use? How do students of Cinema Studies experience their information seeking before the C-thesis? Using a qualitative method, five interviews were conducted with students of Cinema Studies at C-level from Sweden's largest department of Cinema Studies. Models of Wilson from 1999 and Kuhlthau from 2004 were used and applied to the result of the students' experiences of their information seeking. The results showed that moving images are important information resources, as are physical books, web pages, film library DVD-collections, but also illegal web pages. The Royal Library's archives and the Swedish Film institute’s cinema, the Cinematheque, open to the public, were rarely used. The students had no difficulty in gaining access to moving images, but often experienced great difficulties regarding laws and copyrights. Students often felt great enthusiasm at the beginning of their information seeking. After that, the emotions, thoughts and actions of the students varied. Some usually felt secure, but emotions also made students develop their information seeking. Overall, the students were satisfied with their information seeking.

The purpose of this study is to explore the collective identity of incels created on the incel forum incels.is from an information science perspective. This is done by studying both the cognitive information behavior of the forum members as well as the socio-cognitive information practice of the forum. Considering the incel community is online based, a netnographic approach is used. A netnographic approach relying on a non-participant observation of 86 posts made on a publicly available incel forum. Personal narratives in the posts are regarded as the cognitive information behavior of the forum members and analyzed to depict the collective identity of incels through social interactions on incels.is from the collective identity theory. By identifying the incel discussion forum as an echo chamber we explore its information practice with the theory of selective exposure. The information practice of the forum accentuates the habitualization and continuity of the values and polarization that shape the collective identity. The empirical findings show that the collective identity is based off of a polarization between in-groups and out-groups which is heavily marked by terminology and selective exclusion. The forum is a social space strictly for heterosexual males that considers their personal state of involuntary celibacy an identity that needs to be enacted socially with likeminded. The empirical findings tell that the incels believe in a societal hierarchy where they are placed at the bottom for not meeting the heteronormative ideal of beauty and therefor lack romantical and intimate experiences. The collective identity of incels on incels.is consists of evaluating common incel traits, comparing the in-group with the out-group and vent their anger towards those responsible for the men’s loneliness.

The following thesis investigates how social relations affect the type of information that people acquire without actively looking for it. To do this Karen Fisher’s concept of information grounds is being used, together with Mark Granovetter’s theory about the strength of weak ties. The population in the study is new university students. A combination of diaries and interviews was used to gather the empirical material, which was then analyzed using thematic analysis. The analysis showed that the most commonly shared type of information was information about people. Conversations with strong ties were usually more in depth, while conversations with weak ties tended to be more superficial. This finding contributes to the reason why information from weak ties tend to appear more surprising than information from strong ties. Factors other than those officially used together with the information grounds concept turned out to be of both interest and importance to understand why certain information was shared between people, while other information was not. These factors included language, culture, and time.

I norra Sverige sker just nu två samhällsomvandlingar som en följd av det statligt ägda bolaget LKAB:s järnmalmsutvinning i området. Dessa samhällsomvandlingar påverkar inte bara platsen och naturen utan också invånarna i området. En stor del av dessa invånare påverkas då de behöver flytta till följd av den fortsattagruvbrytningen som gör att deras hem måste rivas. Syftet med denna uppsats var att analysera informationsbeteendet hos personer som påverkas avsamhällsomvandlingen just på det sättet, på en av gruvorterna - Kiruna, samt att ta reda på hur informationsprocessen runt samhällsomvandlingen kan se ut. Fyra semistrukturerade intervjuer genomfördes med personer som har, eller kommer behöva flytta. Tillsammans ger de en bild av en situation som innebär att leva under ständig förändring, där både platsen och informationen är föränderlig. I analysen framkom det att informationsdelningen har en ledande aktör och det är LKAB; som delar information via olika kommunikationskanaler och möten. Vidare söker, delar och skapar intervjupersonerna information genom olika informationspraktiker, bland annat då de observerar platsen som är i omvandling.

This thesis strives to explore the PhD students’ information behavior (information needs, information search strat-egies and information management) to see how information literacy (use of information services and resources as well asinformation accessibility and intermediation) can evolve through increased access to information, resources and ideas. The theoretical foundation of the study is Carol C. Kuhlthau’s model of the information search process (ISP-model). Two different surveys were used, first a participant observation and then interviews, with a user group consisting of six postgraduates. The postgraduates were all from different disciplines within the same collage, in the middle of their dissertation and highly motivated by regular information seeking sessions. The study shows that postgraduate students’ knowledge of information behavior and information literacy is inadequate, something that graduate students are largely aware of and wish to change. In conclusion, PhD students need support to maintain, adapt and expand their knowledge. The study indicates that there are many areas where postgraduates’ information literacy can be developed and that there is much to be gained by enhancing the knowledge transfer between information specialists (librarians) and users. This thesis is a two years’ Master’s thesis in Archive, Library and Museum studies.

Information technology and political motives, e.g. e-governance, freedom of information legislation, has recent years lead to an increasing emphasis on users and access to records, but little research based knowledge about those issues exist so far. The main focus of the previous research is the use of non-current records in archival repositories. The aim of this thesis is to make a contribution to the research field, in order to gain a better understanding of the information behaviour of users of records in contemporary organizational settings. The research questions addressed are: § How are records used in contemporary organizations?- In what context and for what purposes are records used?- What user categories can be identified? § How is the search for records mediated?- What intermediaries are used in the search process?- How well do the features of the artefactual intermediaries serve the users' information needs?- What is the role of human intermediaries? An additional purpose of the study is to contribute to theory development, and to provide a conceptual model of the information behaviour of users of records that can form the basis for further research. The thesis is based on explorative case studies undertaken in two contemporary Swedish public organizations, one municipality and one governmental agency. Data was collected through interviews, analysis of documentary sources and complementary observations. The analysis of the findings was guided by a theoretical framework consisting of activity theory informed by concepts from archival theory and models of information behaviour. The results of the cases studies showed that information behaviour of users of records and the search process could be described as a part of an activity system. The search process was a sub-ordinated activity of other activities. The needs for records was generated by a task or accomplishment of anykind with purpose to achieve something. Those needs motivated the purposes of use of records: material, operational, accountability seeking or knowledge enhancing purposes. The subjects, users in collaboration with the registrars and archivists, seeked to obtain records with help of different mediational means, e.g. artifactual intermediaries as the journal and the archives inventory that could be defined as representational systems, in order to reach a certain outcome: fact-finding, re-construction of past actions and events, regaining experience and knowledge, verifying status, or illustrating and exemplifying. A variety of user groups, internal as well as external, could be identified in both organizations. Those could act as direct or indirect users, and indirect use by one part meant direct use by another who acted as a mediator between the records and the end users. The external users could be defined as stakeholders of the organizations or other users. Users showed, with occasional exceptions, a preference for informal means of mediation, particularly personal communication. Certain features of the formal representational systems, journals and inventories, could be identified, which made them less useful as search tool. Those were generated by contradictions and tensions within the organizations: contradictions within the representational systems; contradictions between the tasks of the users and the representational systems; contradictions between user requests and the access points in the representational systems; contradictions between external users and the activities of the organizations; contradictions between exogenous institutional conditions and the the activities of the organizations; and contradictions of a temporal character. These circumstances necessitated an active intervention of human intermediaries. This could be seen as an example of the division of labour in the organizations. Search and retrieval of records were part of the registrars’ and the archivists’ specific professional knowledge, but were not considered as primary tasks of other employees or, especially not, of the external users. The results of the study contributes to to the knowledge about the use of records, and how records are approached. It provides a model of the search process that can form the basis for further research. The practical implications of the findings could be improved search tools and user services, i.e. enhanced access. The thesis can also contribute to theoretical enrichment of the field by combining a more comprehensive social theory with archival theory and concepts from information science. / Utveckling av arkiv- och informationsvetenskap