This aim of this thesis is to measure the effect of the user interface in real searches on the Internet through a small experiment. Theories on web and search usability and psychological factors concerning usability were first explored. Then three interfaces were constructed, one "good" that followed usability guidelines and had multiple search functions, one "bad" that completely disobeyed those guidelines and had only a simple and small search field, and one "intermediate" interface that was a mix of the two. The search field was set to different sizes, with the shortest in the "bad" interface, a medium field in the "intermediate" interface and several long fields in the "good" interface. All three interfaces were then attached to the same web search engine, Altavista.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to investigate international students? views regarding information seeking and use of information sources. A further aim is also to investigate the possible factors influencing information seeking in relation to everyday life for international students. Interviews were carried out with eight international students, 20-35 years old from three continents. They were to stay in Sweden for at least five months for the purpose of studying.

Information overload occurs when the amount of information exceeds the individual s capacity to efficiently process and use the information available. In this situation information instead of being an asset becomes a load. This interview study deals with college students experiences of information overload when working on their thesis. Focus lies on use of Internet based information resources. The main result was that the students experienced information overload in specific situations and steps of the process.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the information need of the incubators that comes from Chalmers University of Technology and are situated at Chalmers Innovation. It is also of interest to investigate how Chalmers University Library covers this information need. The investigation was carried out using qualitative interviews with representatives of the incubators. They were asked questions about the perceived need of information and which type of contacts they had with the library. The result is that the incubators feel that there is a great need for business information that is hard to find.

The purpose of this essay is to explore how students in secondary school seek out and use information. More specifically, the essay examines how the search and use of information differs between students working in groups and students working independently. The essay draws on in-depth interviews with six students. Two different theories are used to analyse the transcripts from the interviews. The first theory consists of Carol Kuhlthau?s six different stages showing how the students? feelings, emotions and actions change during the information seeking process.

The aim of the thesis is to investigate to what extent the pedagogy process has been affected by the close collaboration between librarians and teachers when it comes to education on the Information search process. The thesis shows that the librarian is seen as an acting intermediate for information, and is regarded as a part of the learning process. The issues covered comprise of how students, teachers and librarians perceive that the students becomes information literate, how they perceive that the subject fields are covered, and how information has been transmitted, and how all this has been affected by the fact that the librarian is actually less available in person. Also, the following questions are discussed; how do librarians, teachers and students interact through the homepages of the course and "the landscape of studying"? And in what respect have the old library halls changed into that, which is available 24 hours a day, with different kinds of meeting opportunities where the search of information has been integrated with group projects? The foundation of this study is built on an evaluation of a project comprising of virtual study environment at the University of Linköping.

Companies have in the past decades changed fromtraditional manufacturing organizations into serviceorganizations. For these service organizationsinformation and competence have become animportant resource. The traditional view oninformation is that an employee use and search forinformation to reduce uncertainty for their decisionmaking. Even though information is strategicallyimportant for organizations, information is not valuedin any way. Hence, this thesis aims to valueinformation in terms of the utility it brings to theorganization.The conclusion is that four factors are important whenvaluing information in terms of utility.

The research objective of this thesis was to conduct a holistic evaluation of an operational information system. By holistic evaluation we mean that an equal focus was placed on both the system system perspective and its users user perspective, in the actual environment where the system and its users function contextuality. In addition, the methodological objective of the study was to test a new research approach in a real life setting. The participants of the study were twenty newspaper journalists employed at Göteborgs-Posten GP. The information system NewsLink is a manually indexed full-text database containing all articles published in GP since 1994.

This thesis aims to discuss how an information system and its users may adapt to each other. The main discussion is how to create an information system that is adaptable without losing its organising properties. The thesis uses a holistic approach to the topic and the areas being dealt with are information architecture, interactive information retrieval and Information searching. The practical work consisted of constructing a database for Autoliv?s Research and Development branch.

This Master?s thesis is a comparative study of information retrieval results between three distinct search strategies in simulated automatic query expansion in a bibliographic database. Our purpose is to investigate which of the search strategies score the most effective precision and to what extent the same relevant documents are retrieved (overlapped). A thesaurus attached to the database is used to select appropriate descriptors for the baseline query formulations which subsequently are expanded with hierarchical relations. The search strategies are s1: A baseline query with two or three descriptors, s2: The baseline descriptors combined with at least one Narrower Term, s3: The baseline descriptors combined with Narrower Term and at least one Broader Term.

The aim of this thesis is to describe and critically investigate eight different evaluations of the retrieval effectiveness of webbased search engines. The questions to be answered in this investigation are: - What kind of relevance judgements have been used? - Which criteria have been used when judging the relevance of a document? - Which measures have been used? - How many queries have been used? - How were the queries constructed? - What document cut-off value has been used? - Has hypothes testing been applied? - What kind of webbased search engines have been included in the evaluations? The study showed that although the evaluations investigate the same phenomena, they are very different from each other in certain aspects. Generally the study showed that precision is the preferred measure in comparison to recall in the chosen evaluation even though all the included evaluations have constructed unique formulas for calculating precision. Some attempts to measure relative recall have been performed but they all suffer from different defects.

The birth of a child marks a new era for the parents. It is the beginning of something that will never end, because they will always be the child´s parents. This study investigates what happens when an infant is born whit Downs syndrome (Ds), and thus does not resemble the child the parents had expected. The purpose of this literature study was to describe the information and the support that the parents of a newborn child with Ds think that they need. The literature search was made in the database of Medline (via Pub Med), Academic Search Elite and manual search.

Internet has made information more easy to get, but also more difficult to retrieve. There is a need for information retrieval systems that assure accurate, reliable and up to date information. Quite a number of both commercial and non commercial search services has been developed on the Internet. We have made a qualitative study of one for-pay product in particular, NetS k, produced by BTJ (Bibliotekstj nst), Lund. It is a database that contains collected, evaluated and classified links, and is especially developed to suit public librarians in Sweden.

The purpose of this study is to examine the retrieval performance of three search engines, specialized in retrieving news articles: News Index, Excite News Search and Ananova. Thirty questions, grouped into three categories – politics, economy and sports, were used and the first twenty documents for each question were examined. The questions used were designed to be as current as possible and efforts were made to perform the searches with as little time span as possible between each search engine. The precision of the search engines was determined for each of the questions as well as for each category and for the combined categories. In measuring precision an average was calculated, intended to favour search engines that place its relevant documents early in the ranked list.

The purpose with this thesis is to research what function the National Library Catalogue of Sweden (LIBRIS) has as an information resource for Chinese language material. How is LIBRIS used as an information resource seen from the point of view of a users specific language need. This will be exemplified through an empirical survey of three user groups with different prerequisites concerning their knowledge in Chinese. Group A were beginners and had studied Chinese for one year. Group B were advanced students who were studying their third year of Chinese.