Purpose: This thesis aims to study how students in upper secondary school evaluate sources in their everyday school work and how the role of the school library and librarian officiate in this context. Methodology: A web questionnaire was conducted and 155 students from different schools, with or without school library and school librarian, participated. We coded and aggregated the questionnaires according to the strategies that are used when evaluating sources, identified by Francke, Sundin and Limberg. Cognitive authority, a theory by Patrick Wilson, was also a part of our analysis.  Conclusions: The study shows that students use different strategies, separately or combined, as a way to evaluate sources. The teacher is regarded as a cognitive authority and is the main influence concerning source evaluation. It also shows that the role of school libraries and school librarians, in this context, seem to be non-existent. The fact that not all students have access to school libraries makes it difficult to come to any conclusions regarding this matter. It also seems to be an uncertainty regarding the students’ knowledge about their school library and its resources.

This Master’s thesis concerns the information behaviour of pastors in nonconformist churches (especially new evangelical and Baptist church communions) in Sweden in their spiritual service to the local parish. The thesis also looks into how the information flow functions in the pastors’ context and why the information need appears as it does. The theory used in this study is contextual analysis based on Buckland’s, Weber’s and Patrick Wilson’s theories on authority and power structures. Interviews with open-question approach were conducted with 6 pastors. Analysis showed that the pastors use different sources in their effort to intermediate information to their congregation. The most common source is literature, i.e. the Bible or other Christian literature and reference books. The pastors express the importance of meditation and prayer to access divine information, as well as the influence of important cognitive authorities. What the pastors lack is a clear view on how sermons are received, but most importantly a way of accessing information through sources they are unfamiliar with. They tend to walk the same information path as they have before. I propose that national church communions work together in establishing means for pastors to access said information. The literary circulation within the Christian church appears to be strong in the way that they hardly use any non-Christian resources and that the pastors in high regard use the same literature that other pastors do. There is also a need to further study how information flows within the small congregation as well as to study meditative and spiritual information search. / Uppsatsnivå: D

The main purpose of this master’s thesis is to examine how high school students evaluate the quality of the information available on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. By doing quantitative research based on questionnaires we expected to find that the means for judging that students use in this situation are most frequently based on a text’s intrinsic qualities in the point of view of its content. It was also our presupposition that 18 and 19 year old high school graduates have received some education in information research and authoritative sources on the Internet. From this assumption we assessed that, while not always using methods recommended by experts, the students use Wikipedia with a high level of healthy suspicion. We considered Patrick Wilson’s theory about cognitive authority to be valid for these assumptions. Though generalizations based on a large sample reduce an understanding of each individual’s expected behavior during information qualitiy evaluation, conclusions could be drawn about which criteria most individuals in this age use in a situation like this. The results show that though intrinsic plausibility has great significance in the students’ evaluation of quality, looking for outside sources is still the main criteria for credibility. It was further discovered that the students in the study used a wide variety of criteria apart from intrinsic plausibility and examining outside sources. This can be of certain significance for future research because it gives us valuable information about the behavior of high school students in terms of information research. / Uppsatsnivå: D

Amningshjälpen is a Swedish non-profit association where women, called helpmothers, provide breastfeeding peer-support. Purpose: The aim of this bachelor thesis is to examine how and where helpmothers experience information needs and seek information on breastfeeding, and what obstacles they face doing this. Method: The method used is qualitative email-interview where four helpmothers answered a number of questions via email comparable to questions in a semi-structured interview. Theoretical framework: This thesis rests upon the serious leisure perspective and the theory of cognitive authority, particularly institutional authority and the theory that cognitive authority is created in communication between people. Earlier research: Earlier research shows that seeking leisure-related information is an ongoing process. Participants use a variety of sources and the most common are other people and the internet. Result and discussion: The results show that the helpmothers information behaviour is similar to that of earlier studies in serious leisure. Their information seeking is an ongoing process that cannot easily be separated from information seeking in daily life. This could be an explanation to why they don’t experience many information needs. They use a variety of sources, including databases, books and homepages. The most common sources are other people: laypersons, health care professionals and other helpmothers. When seeking information helpmothers want the information to be unbiased and based on science, they also encourage each other to look for such information. This way they are both part of and affected by the process of making science as an institution a cognitive authority in society.

Altmetrics is a relatively new metric system compared to traditional bibliometric methods. The purpose of this bachelor thesis was to conduct a cross-sectional study of the altmetric usage in Swedish university libraries and to see if and how they use altmetrics and how it can benefit the scholarly communication between academic librarians and scholars. The research questions are;• Do Swedish university libraries use altmetrics, and if so, how? • How do the librarians experience the attitude from the researchers, regarding their opinions about altmetrics? • How can altmetric tools be an aid in the scholarly communication and what is altmetrics advantages and disadvantages according to the librarians?A survey was sent out to all universities in Sweden and their main libraries. For theoretical framework the concepts Technologies of Control and Technologies of Narcissism together with the concept Cognitive Authority were used. The results show that altmetrics is a tool that the academic libraries are familiar with but few are actually using. The scholars and PhD students think that altmetrics is something than can be used for “fun”, to see their own impact but not for evaluating. The librarians see altmetric as a tool that is a complement to traditional citations and not something that will replace it. Altmetrics can show a broader and faster impact but the altmetric data is unreliable and more studies have to be done.

<p>The main purpose of this bachelor’s thesis is to examine how Swedish upper secondary school librarians and related staff relate to the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia. The research is placed in the all-embracing context of information literacy and source criticism on the Internet. The study was carried out in the form of qualitative interviews and based on two theoretical bases: firstly, the concept of cognitive authority stipulated by Patrick Wilson, and secondly the idea that Wikipedia has a draw towards late modern epistemological assumptions. The latter theory was also associated with the perceptions of knowledge among the library staff interviewed. According to the results, there seems to be a connection between a) the library staff’s perceptions of knowledge, b) the library staff’s actual knowing about Wikipedia, c) the library staff’s attitudes toward Wikipedia and d) the teaching performed by the library staff about Wikipedia. The results also suggest the cognitive authority of the traditional encyclopaedia to be strong, especially among those within the library staff not very familiar with Wikipedia. Those positive to Wikipedia possibly represent perceptions of knowledge with a draw towards the late modern. Finally, possible solutions regarding the improvement of information literacy and of Wikipedia usage among the upper secondary school pupils are discussed.</p>

This Master´s thesis is a user study of nurses participating in continuing education. The nurses graduated before 1993, when education to become a nurse changed in Sweden. Now they are studying for 40 credits in Nursing at a university in order to get the same level of education as a newly graduated nurse. They were also working as nurses when this study took place. The main purpose of the study is to increase the understanding of what kind of information the nurses think they need and to find out if and in what way they use libraries in their studies and in their work. The empirical material was collected by qualitative, semi-structured interviews with six nurses. To analyze the answers Kuhlthau´s model of information search process, Sundin´s concept of the symbolic value of professional information and Wilson´s concept of cognitive authority were used.The results of this study show that the nurses need course literature, scientific articles and help to search for information in databases. They all felt anxiety for not finding the right information exactly as Kuhlthau´s model shows.The nurses know it is important to keep updated with new information in their specialty in nursing and they know where to find the information. Professional information could help the nurses in their cooperation with other occupational groups, for example physicians.They all use libraries; to borrow books, find articles and also to use the librarian´s expertise in searching. They prefer to visit the medical library at their work and they appreciate the library staff´s knowledge.

This study examines journalism student’s information use atSödertörn University during the writing process of theirbachelor thesis. The students are divided in two groupsfollowing the schools main bachelor programs majoring injournalism.The method used in this study has been a reference analysisof the student’s bibliographies along with five semistructuredinterviews. The study stems upon a socioculturalperspective and drives the thesis that information use is asituated activity. In order to analyze which criteria used bythe students to determine source credibility, the concept of“cognitive authorities” has been used.The results of the reference analysis show that the studentsuse a large quantity of empirical material, first and foremostnewspaper articles. Monographs and anthologies are alsofrequently used and a high quantity of those could also befound in the students’ curriculums.The interview study shows that the respondents are verymuch aware about the differences in writing a news articleand writing a bachelor thesis. But even if the information uselooks different between these two, the demands from thestudents of the sources are similar to the demands found inearlier research on active journalists; they ought to be current,easy to access and credible.This study strengthens the thesis that information use issituated and that the information use among these journalismstudents differs from earlier research groups. / Program: Bibliotekarie

The purpose of this Master’s thesis is to investigate the information use in teacher education students’ degree projects. The first study is a reference analysis used to categorize the cited sources in 33 degree projects from the teacher education program at one Swedish university. The aim was to find out what types of sources were used, in particular the amount of citations to scholarly publications. The results of the reference analysis showed that the majority of sources used were text books. Scholarly publications amounted to 10% of the citations and scholarly articles were scarcely used. The second study consists of semi-structured interviews with six supervisors to gain understanding of their functions in relation to information use and to find out what judgements supervisors make of the reliability of sources. The supervisors were found to have four functions: suggest literature, refer students to the library, guide selection of sources and instruct on the use of literature. Doctoral theses, scholarly articles and research based literature are source types with a high degree of reliability according to the supervisors, while sources without a foundation in research were considered to have a low degree of reliability. The interview data was analysed using Norman Fairclough’s model of critical discourse analysis and the cognitive authority of source types was discussed. This thesis identifies a discrepancy between sources used by students and the supervisors’ judgements of reliable sources and the conclusion is that increased knowledge and use of scholarly publications holds a potential for teacher education and the teaching profession.

The main purpose of this Master’s thesis is to contribute to anincreased understanding of student teacher’s informationseeking for their studies. The role of cognitive authorities andapproaches to the critical evaluation of sources are taken intoaccount as well as what student experiences of informationseeking imply for their future profession. The study takes asociocultural perspective and the empirical material is based oninterviews with six student teachers at the end of theireducation. The interviews have been analysed with a departurepoint in the research questions to the following themes; seekingand finding information, critical evaluation of sources and,analysing and using information.The major findings concern the teacher students’ emphasis onthe importance of the critical evaluation of sources and theirscepticism towards Internet use, both for their own studies aswell as for their future pupils. The student teachers expressedawareness of cognitive authorities when seeking information informal printed sources, but they were not fully aware of the roleof teachers and supervisors as cognitive authorities. Several ofthe informants expressed a need for teaching methods related toinformation seeking. / Program: Bibliotekarie