The purpose of this study is to examine and explain why three Swedish public libraries failedin their ambition to act as information services for small and medium-sized firms (SMF). To support this purpose two major assumptions are made:1) Public libraries who plan to run this kind of "business" must act with the same means as "professional" services.2) The service must be adjusted to the information needs of the customer.Based on these assumptions sixteen factors which are crucial to the "success" for this kind of service are presented.Applied to the information services of Lidkoping, Sölvesborg and Västervik, these factors reveal a number of shortcomings and mistakes made by the libraries.To understand this result these information services are seen as parts of a traditional Swedish public "library-thought". It is shown that, fundamental ideas in the way the public libraries are defined, like the responsibility to act in a neutral and democratic way, also characterised the three information services.These ideas together with the opinion of SMF as a "rational" information-consumer resulted in information services who did not meet the information-needs and information-behaviour of SMF.

The purpose of this Master’s thesis is to present a survey of how Swedish libraries provide information services for children. In this thesis “information” means non-fiction material and “children” do not include preschool children. The method used is knowledge overview and the material (mostly Master theses in LIS published January 2001-June 2006) is related to user studies of children as information seekers. From the result and analysis can be found that librarians often adjust the common Swedish classification system, SAB, to children’s needs and that librarians have a clear view of how to achieve good reference interviews with children. Our material indicates that libraries seldom have plans for their acquisitions in order to develop the collection of children’s material, and we have found only a few libraries using other materials than books to find information suitable for children. In Sweden there exists no database which includes children’s journals. There are some library catalogues for children; one of them has been investigated by LIS-students and was found partially corresponding to children’s needs. The current Swedish list of subject headings for children is developed for fiction, and there is a need for discussing the indexing of non-fiction material. The providing of Internet for children varies a lot among libraries. There is a need for analysing children’s use of the big web portal Länkskafferiet. Only a few studies were found that investigate Swedish children’s interaction with information services, which leads to the conclusion that there is a clear need for such research. / Uppsatsnivå: D

This master's thesis focuses on the development of a strategy for aninformation service in the area of digitization of cultural heritage andresearch, with a web based platform as implementation of the strategy. Viathe platform, digital collections and research are presented and shared.Services around the platform are provided. Support activities comprise thewhole chain of digitization, from digitization to archival of the digitizedobjects. The information service aims for a new approach to combine ICT andestablished research; research and industrial practice were combined andcooperation of participants from various backgrounds was enabled. Thestrategy and organization of such information service was described using a“quality management system”, standard ISO 9001. The development of theplatform followed engineering practices. A guideline for the platform wasestablished as part of the quality management system. On the platform, initialcollections were encoded by the humanities' text encoding standard TEI, thatbases on XML, and analysis with them were done. / Program: Masters programme: Library and Information Science, Digital Library and Information Services

This two years master’s thesis in Library and Information Sciences aims to investigate and put the services of 118100 Svar På Allt (SPA, an SMS mobile question and answer service) and Fråga biblioteket (FB, a library operated e-mail reference service) into the context of the reference encounter. Questions sent to SPA and their subsequent answers are analysed, and part of these questions are forwarded to FB for comparative studies. Both of the formats are compared to the reference encounter as a whole. The framing of the question originates in the assumption that there may be a need for further negotiation of the questions submitted to the aforementioned formats. Do SPA and FB constitute formats different enough from the reference encounter to imply that the question at hand already has gone through the apropiate negotiations? These compressed and asynchronous reference services are not only compared to the synchronous reference, but are also examined as reference services in their own right. How does the e-mail reference and the SMS services fare against each other and the “regular” reference encounter? Findings in the analysis are subjected to appliable INSU theories, especially Robert S. Taylors thoughts on question negotitation and Nicholas Belkins et al regarding anomalous states of knowledge. Further major contributors are Marie L. Radford concerning the reference encounter and Reijo Savolainen on everyday information practices. The study found several occasions where a personal, or at least synchronous, reference encounter would have been decidedly more helpful than that of the electronic services. However, the larger majority of the questions analysed turned out to be completed in formulation for the compressed, asynchronous format. The e-mails of FB can to some extent work as an intermediary service since it is more allowing lengthwise than SPA and gives more of an opportunity to redirect towards more exhaustive sources.

The aim of this master’s thesis is to examine the virtual reference service Ask the Library [Bibblan svarar] from a postmodern perspective. Ask the Library is a Swedish online reference service that is run by the country’s public libraries. The postmodern theories of Jean-François Lyotard are used to study how information is managed and transmitted within the service. From this point-of-view three aspects of the reference service are studied; how the information is affected by the virtual environment, the librarian’s role within the service and finally how the content of the service is managed. The methods for extracting data are a blend of qualitative interviews and online observations. The data is then analyzed from a theoretical viewpoint. The result shows that there are several postmodern tendencies in Ask the Library. Namely the service shows a number of indications toward plurality. This can be related to Lyotard’s theory of the downfall of the grand narratives since postmodern theories celebrate the idea of plurality and diversity. Ask the Library is complex and dynamic in the sense that it adapts its services to the users. In addition to a multilingual service, Ask the Library also offers the users reference help in the form of social network sites like Facebook and Twitter. This makes the service more varied but also deeply complex. The reference service also emphasizes on the librarian’s individual competence and promotes personal knowledge and expertise. In Lyotard’s postmodern theories there is a rejection of absolute and objective truths and this falls in line with the subjectivity that the reference service celebrates. Ask the Library has two different agendas; providing qualitative reference service to the users and also promoting the librarians and their skills. The information, or content, in the service is still organized and under examination by the librarians. Critique of the sources is an important skill for a librarian within Ask the Library to have. These traditional ideas of objective truth are balanced with the new virtual environment that often promotes collective construction of information and knowledge. This study is a two years master’s thesis in the academic field library and information science.

The academic field of political science in Europe is studied in this thesis which examines the application of bibliometrics for domain analysis. It takes its point of departure in the domain analytic approach outlined by Birger Hjørland and Hanne Albrechtsen, which claims the study of domains as central for information specialists to be able to identify information needs in their fields of practice. Three features of the domain were studied by the use of bibliometric methods. Data was extracted from the Web of Science. Impact Factor was used to select 50 journals from each of the years 1999, 2004 and 2009. Only items published by authors with European addresses were included. Co-word analysis was used to study topics within the discipline and several kinds of citation analyses were conducted to examine citation patterns of the domain. Lastly core journals, authors and works were identified by the use of citation analysis and co-citation maps were drawn for the analyses.Several subfields within the domain, as well as some differences in citation patterns of the subfields, were possible to distinguish. The domain showed to be multifaceted, yet specific European research areas were identified. Some significant changes of the citation patterns were apparent between 1999 and 2009. In 2009 there were more references per article, journal articles were cited to a higher degree, relatively older publications were cited to a greater extent and the most cited journals received a larger share of the total amount of citations.The existence of a specific European domain within political science is discussed as well as the diverse characteristics of the subfields and their implications for the bibliometric methods. Finally suggestions are presented of how bibliometrics can be used for domain analysis within library and information science as well as by information service institutions.This paper is a two years master’s thesis in Library and Information Science. / Det akademiska statsvetenskapliga fältet i Europa studeras i denna uppsats, vilken utforskar bibliometrins tillämpbarhet inom domänanalysen. Den tar sin utgångspunkt i det domänanalytiska perspektivet formulerat av Birger Hjørland och Hanne Albrechtsen, vilket hävdar studier av domäner som centrala för att informationsspecialister ska kunna identifiera informationsbehov inom sina verksamheter. Tre aspekter av domänen studerades med bibliometriska metoder, data hämtades från Web of Science. Impact Factor användes för att välja ut 50 tidskrifter för vardera av åren 1999, 2004 och 2009. Endast artiklar publicerade av författare med Europeiska adresser inkluderades. Co-word-analys användes för att studera disciplinens ämnesområden, flera olika citeringsanalyser genomfördes för att utforska citeringsmönster inom domänen och slutligen identifierades centrala tidskrifter, författare och verk genom citeringsanalys och co-citerings-kartor skapades för analyserna. Flera delfält inom domänen kunde urskiljas, samt några skillnader mellan delfältens citeringsmönster. Domänen visade sig vara multifacetterad, men specifikt europeiska forskningsområden kunde identifieras. Några betydande förändringar av citeringsmönstren var märkbara mellan åren 1999 och 2009. Artiklarna från 2009 innehöll fler referenser per artikel, tidskriftsartiklar citerades i högre grad, relativt äldre publikationer citerades i större utsträckning och de mest citerade tidskrifterna tog emot en större andel av citeringarna. Existensen av en specifik europeisk domän inom statsvetenskapen diskuteras samt hur de bibliometriska metoderna påverkas av skillnader mellan delfälten. Slutligen presenteras förslag på hur bibliometrin kan användas för domänanalys inom biblioteks- och informationsvetenskapen samt av institutioner tillhandahållande informationstjänster.