The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate 7 different search strategies for content-based image retrieval with respect to retrieval effectiveness. The strategies are based on different levels of resolution implemented by the Haar transformation. The result of the study shows an improvement in both mean average precision and mean recall in strategies based on lower levels of resolution..

Lean Product Development is a knowledge-based business concept in order to maintain high quality, meetcustomer requirements and to make product development more efficient. An important part of the processis to add a lot of resources at an early stage and execute the development as an iterative process betweendepartments exploring many alternatives thoroughly. The work focuses on how Lean ProductDevelopment is carried out and explores how to manage interaction between different departments andexpertise with regard to cross-functional collaboration and knowledge sharing i.e. learning.The information for the studies was gathered at a major Swedish company from two projects. The projectswere carried out as cross-functional and possible key factors for cross-functional collaboration wasidentified.The results have been correlated with theories of Lean, Product development, Lean product developmentand Learning.

This Masters thesis concerns how library and preschool can cooperate in supporting childrens language development and especially that of bilingual children. We have investigated how librarians and preschool teachers different competences can complement each other to gain the best result in work with childrens language development. This study is based on qualitative interviews with four librarians and three preschool teachers. The answers from them have been analysed according to different categories. Our results show that both librarians and preschool teachers think that bilingual children need extra support and that it takes longer to learn two languages.

This master's thesis reports on our investigation of how the public librarian's professional identity is formed and what it is formed of. We have considered factors such as: education, competence and daily tasks. In order to fulfil this aim we have used a literature study on concepts such as competence, education, professional identity and profession. We have also carried out an empirical study where we have interviewed nine librarians on public libraries. The method of analysis is qualitative.

Abstract: The world in which companies are acting today offers challenges in the sense that it is rapidly changing and that a vast amount of information is available. In order to ensure the competitiveness and survival of the company, an effective and efficient environmental scanning is essential to the company. Our aim with this Master's thesis is to investigate what factors constitutes important and basic conditions in a well functioning environmental scanning and how companies strategically can go about to achieve this. In order to highlight and specify how these factors can be applied on a specific company Thule has been our focal point. Thule.

The main purpose of this study was to examine how preschool teachers are working to promote each child's language development and whether they can ensure that they do that. Therefore I wanted to find out what a good language development implies for each teacher, how they work to promote each child's language development in daily practice, how they measure the actual language development and also what conditions the teachers have, to engage in a language development way to work. For the study, I chose a qualitative method, with structured interviews and all together I interviewed six preschool teachers, within the same organization in a suburb close to Stockholm.  The results showed that there is an ambiguity, among the preschool teachers, in what a good language development means, but it can be stated that they do have a language development way to work even if it needs to be developed. Further on, it has emerged that the teachers have the tools to measure children's language development, although they do not have the conditions yet to use the method to the fullest. About the preschool teachers own conditions in order to operate in a language development way to work, I concluded that they have a strong foundation to build on, but they still have much work ahead of them.

TPB, The Swedish Library of Talking Books and Braille, has requested a study to investigate the organization and content of a possible future Swedish web portal for users with reading disabilities. The aim of this thesis is to conduct such a study, with an emphasis on knowledge organization. The main aspects studied are formal description, representation, search and retrieval, document retrieval, and additionally also aspects related to content. The following questions are answered in this thesis: - How are web portals, online databases and Internet libraries for users with reading disabilities constructed, from an organization of knowledge point of view? - How can these solutions for knowledge organization be incorporated into a possible Swedish web portal? - With regards to content, which additional aspects are present in the studied web portals, online databases and Internet libraries? The questions are addressed through a detailed study of ten web portals, online databases and Internet libraries from Nordic and Anglo-American parts of the world.

The Division of Language and Communication at Chalmers uses a web-based language tool, named EngOnline, to teach English grammar. The language tool suffers from some shortcomings. These include stability problems and an outdated interface but, above all, there is no documentation. Because of the lack of documentation and EngOnline?s need of maintenance, the Division of Language and Communication has decided to replace the language tool with a new and well documented one.The new language tool was developed using an agile work process; detailed documentation was replaced with more efficient communication.

Internet is the world?s largest source of information, and it is expanding every day. It is possible to find all kind of information as long as you know how and where to look for it, but still it is only the words itself that are searched for. We have with this essay tried to find an approach that makes it possible to give the word a meaning or a context.We have, as a starting point used the Socrates method, which is a method that breaks down texts into its smallest elements and forms activities. We have redone these activities to ontologies by forming general and specific descriptions of the activities.

Our state of emergency is good - is the public library prepared for the future?Our state of emergency is good! These are the words spoken by Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson in 1939. He claimed that Sweden had nothing to fear from a future war, we were safe. Today we know it was not so. Is this the situation for Swedish public library of today? Is the public library ready to face the future, or is it only fancy words?We have to form the future, not let the future form us.

This research shows and analyses how pupils in ninth grade in the nine-year compulsory school look at being multilingual, at the Swedish language and at Swedish as a second language. I also want to know if language and culture knowledge are taken care of in school as it says in official documents for the Swedish school and as it also is desired in an intercultural education. For my research I do eight interviews in a suburb school south of Stockholm.My work includes a limited account for the current research about being multilingual, Swedish as a second language and about the close relationship between language and culture. The applied theory is a social constructivist theory which in short can be explained like that we construct social structures that have consequences on the individual as well as on the society.I show in my research how the view of the world around the pupils influences their view on their languages, their school and their neighbourhood. I also draw conclusions from my interviews that language knowledge is little appreciated in school and that Swedish as a second language has a low status..

The aim of this paper is to examine the actualities of Information Practicefor single women whose parentage has been made possible through assistedreproduction, which places these parents in a norm-breaking position.Study issues related to parents? perceptions of information needs areinvestigated, as is the process of information retrieval and library usageas well as the obstacles and opportunities facing parents in search ofinformation related to their own family constellation. To this end, theoriesby Tom Wilson, Reijo Savolainen and Elfreda A. Chatman have been usedas a model of selection. Empirical data have been gathered from interviewswith eight single women, whose parentage has been made possible throughartificial insemination or IVF with sperm from an open or anonymousdonor.

The aim of this masters thesis is to examine query expansion. Query expansion is the process of adding new terms to a query to improve the retrieval effectiveness. In this study the baseline query was expanded in five different modes. The first expansion strategy was formulated by the inflected terms as the system does not allow truncation, I have inflected the terms, e. g.

The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate three search engines with regard to retrieval effectiveness of information specific to Swedish users. Coverage and the precision in result descriptions are also examined. The three selected search engines are Google, MSN Search and Svesök. 30 queries were tested against the search engines and the first 20 result descriptions and results were judged for relevancy. Relevancy was judged by a binary scale.

This study is a comparative study of the occurrence and function of information literacy in the curricula of the Swedish and Bavarian Gymnasium and investigates the occurrence of the term ?information literacy? and shows through what other linguistic means the notion of information literacy is expressed in the curricula. The study also wishes to analyze how the notion of information literacy manifests itself in the different school systems. Relevant textual passages of both curricula are compared to each other through the theoretic lens of Bruce?s phenomenographic model of information literacy.