The aim of the study has been to find out children?s librarians? views on and management of media that contains topics with a controversial nature and also to find out how this affects the public library as a democratic institution. We have conducted the study by interviewing six children?s librarians. By using Vestheim?s terms value rationality and instrumental rationality, we have been categorizing the answers from our informants and thus identified two different points of view.

This thesis examines the effects of proximity operators and query expansion with synonyms on retrieval performance. The queries were expanded with synonyms and structured with proximity operators where the permitted distance between terms varied from 1 to 3. The expansion terms were selected from the online lexical reference system WordNet. Initial query terms were selected from 28 topics that contained compound words and were chosen on the basis of their expandibility. The English morphological analyser ENGTWOL was used for normalization of query terms.

This thesis deals with one of the main questions within information science: The question about controlled and uncontrolled vocabulary and which of the two that are most effective when it comes to retrieve relevant information from electronic databases. The method used here is literature studies. I have described and examined five empirical studies which has been done in purpose to compare the effectiveness in retrieval with controlled and uncontrolled vocabulary, in the way they are used in retrieval of information in databases. The studies I have examined have also used recall and precision as a value to measure the effectiveness of retrieval. The studies which I have chosen is also limited to deal only with studies that have been done in bibliographic databases.

The starting point of this study is that the news media in general strongly influence which topics determine the public agenda by their choice of what is considered newsworthy. The study is based on articles from two major Swedish daily newspapers, Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter. The aim of our thesis is to establish how the environmental public debate as portrayed in the newspaper corresponds to the environmental discussion within the scientific (subject matter expert) field, that is taught by the academic institutions, or if the two materially differ. The environmental communication discourse at the academic institutions advocates ?episodic? formation as the driving force behind transformation of attitudes and behavioral preconceptions. This episodic formation is aimed at incentivizing change by creating intimacy to the incident by linking cause and consequence to the individual citizen instead of to society as a whole.

The purpose with this essay is to evaluate the retrieval performance between Googles basic search and the advanced search functions. A secondary purpose is to evaluate the differences between the binary relevance scale and a 4- point scale. The basic search is defined as a search with two terms combined with the Boolean operator AND. The advanced search is based on search functions that are adequate to compare to the basic search. They are categorized as AND-searches, OR-searches, AND and OR-searches, exact phrase, and depending on where the terms occur on the page.

Objectives: The aim in this thesis has been to generate information relevant for strategic positioning and future evaluations within the scientific field of sport and exercise psychology. This has been done by request, and in collaboration with The Group of Sport and Exercise Psychology at the Institution of Psychology at the University of Umeå.Research questions:  (1) How does the cognitive structure within the field of sport and exercise psychology take shape with respect to research topics in current sport-psychological research, i.e. the research front? (2) How does the social structure within the field of sport and exercise psychology take shape with respect to formal scientific collaboration?Data: 879 articles published between 2008-2011 were used in this study. The population of articles were collected from a set of 5 core journals: International Journal of Sport Psychology, Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, The Sport Psychologist, Psychology of Sport and Exercise.

The aim of this master thesis is to evaluate the performance of the content-based image retrieval system ImBrowse from a semantic point of view. Evaluation of retrieval performance is a problem in content-based image retrieval (CBIR). There are many different methods for measuring the performance of content-based image retrieval systems, but no common way for performing the evaluation. The main focus is on image retrieval regarding the extraction of the visual features in the image, from three semantic levels. The thesis tries to elucidate the semantic gap, which is the problem when the systems extraction of the visual features from the image and the user?s interpretation of that same information do not correspond.

In query expansion (QE) terms are added to an initial query in order to improve retrieval effectiveness. In this thesis we use QE in the sense that a reformulation of the query is done by deleting the terms in the initial query and instead replacing them with terms from the documents retrieved in the initial run. The aim of this thesis is to, in a experimental full text invironment, study and compare the retrieval result of two different query expansion strategies in relation to each other. The following questions are addressed by the study: How do the two strategies perform in relation to each other regarding recall? What may be causing the result? Are the two strategies retrieving the same relevant documents? Two strategies are designed to simulate a searcher using automatic query expansion (AQE) either with or without relevance feedback.

The aim of this thesis is to describe passage retrieval (PR), with basis in results from various empirical experiments, and to critically investigate different approaches in PR. The main questions to be answered in the thesis are: (1) What characterizes PR? (2) What approaches have been proposed? (3) How well do the approaches work in experimental information retrieval (IR)? PR is a research topic in information retrieval, which instead of retrieving the fulltext of documents, that can lead to information overload for the user, tries to retrieve the most relevant passages in the documents. This technique was investigated studying a number of central articles in the research field. PR can be divided into three different types of approaches based on the segmentation of the documents.

The purpose of this essay is to increase the understanding of how the management´s core values reflect the brand´s profile and image. To be able to fulfill that purpose, we used three problem statements that questioned how consumers, retailers and the employees of the company Kosta Boda perceived the brand. To accomplish this, we used a qualitative method. We started collecting theories about the topics: brand, image and profile that gave us a good foundation to build our qualitative interviews on and to increase the understanding for the topics. To collect imperical data, we interviewed consumers, retailers and employees at Kosta Boda both by email, phone and face-to-face interviews.

This bachelor thesis covers fire protection methods of structural steel and the aim is to develop an information tool designed for inexperienced structural engineers. The information tool covers basic fire protection methods and the general way to produce a fire resistance for structural steel. The layout of this information tool is a simple folder that contains information about the most important steps when producing fire protection for a steel structure.The thesis starts with a general overview of the fire protection needed in buildings to fulfill national legislative and regulatory requirements. To get an understanding of how steel components behave during the influence of fire, a brief overview is presented of the material properties of steel. This chapter also contains a review of previous research in the area.

The aim of this Master's thesis is to investigate the library needs of distance students. This user study has a student perspective and concentrates on the main question of which way library needs might be expressed by distance students. Associated topics addressed by this study include; the problem of learning centres lacking their own library support, how distance students look upon library support as a concept and whether distance students prefer public libraries or university libraries, and why they make this choice. These questions may give the answer to how distance students deal with information literacy. Theories chosen by the study are in the fields of pedagogical and library science, the social cultural theory by Roger Säljö and in Tom Wilson's theories on user studies and information needs.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the performance of queries that are expanded by 1 inflections, 2 compound splitting and 3 inflections and compound splitting combined. For compound splitting, the morphological analyser SWETWOL was used. Queries were executed in the Query Performance Analyser, QPA, containing the InQuery system. Query terms were selected from 29 topics, all of whom containing at least one compound word. Both the queries and the documents were in Swedish.

Bakgrund: Graviditet och tidigt moderskap är perioder då kvinnor aktivt söker ny kunskap.Tillgången till hälsorelaterad information är enorm men kvaliteten på innehållet varierarmellan olika källor. För att kunna göra informerade val i hälsofrågor behöver mödrarevidensbaserad information, och det är en barnmorskas ansvar att kunna guida dem tillhögkvalitativa källor. Syfte: Syftet med denna studie var att kartlägga nyblivna mödrarsinformationssökning samt att undersöka om det finns samband mellan informationssökning ocholika sociodemografiska bakgrundsvariabler. Metod: Undersökningen baserades på delar av enpilotstudie inför ett större europeiskt projekt och data från 137 enkäter till nyblivna mödraranalyserades. Resultat: De mest använda informationskällorna bland mödrarna varbarnavårdscentral och vårdsidor på Internet, således källor som tillhandahåller evidensbaseradinformation.

This Masters thesis deals with query expansion in an online library catalogue. The aim of the study was to compare the retrieval effectiveness of four different query types when applied to the online library catalogue of the University College of Borås. The query types were: an initial query, the initial query with right hand truncation, the initial query expanded with synonyms and finally the initial query expanded with synonyms and right hand truncation. 24 topics were formulated, and four queries for each topic were constructed. The records retrieved by the searches were judged with regard to topicality, and were judged to be non-relevant, partially relevant or relevant.