The aim of this thesis has been to examine and delineate the use of electronic information sources among the newsroom staff members at the Swedish daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet(SvD). The aim has also been to make comparisons between this examination and a similar one performed at the British newspaper the Guardian in 1991 / 1992.

The examination at Svenska Dagbladet was carried out in the autumn of 1996. A questionnaire was distributed to 273 of the staff members at SvD and 229 forms were returned. A minor member of interviews were also carried out. The survey's major findings are that SvD's staff members are generally high-volume users of the electronic newspaper archive. Less than a half of the staff use external databases at least once a month. The most favoured group of external databases are the one's of the Swedish vendor Affarsdata. Almost all users have received training on SvD's electronic text archive, but only a minority on external databases.The survey shows that the SvD journalists are interested in database use but they are at the same time limited in the mastery of the search process. The journalists principally conduct subject searches and they use databases in order to find out what has previously been written on a subject and to look for background information. The results of this survey and the one carried out at the Guardian generally correspond. Furthermore, a majority of the staff members use Internet to receive information.