Today, one of the foremost tools used by the library staff is the Library catalogue search tools. It has come to our understanding that some library staff are dissatisfied with how the search tools works. The aim of this study is to illuminate the library staff's negative experiences of the search tools, and to present a basis for future discussion and development. To our help we have used a quantitative survey which were sent to library staff that used one of the two largest integrated library systems in Sweden, BOOK-IT and Mikromarc. The questions regarded the library staff's perception of a number of features in the search tools.

The purpose of this Master's thesis is to examine whether a web-based Library catalogue is to be considered user-friendly. We have examined this from a user-perspective by interviewing users of a web-based catalogue at a public library. In order to get a picture of the user-friendliness of a catalogue, the thesis is centred upon the following questions: How is a web-based catalogue used? What problems do the users experience? How is the catalogue perceived by its users? Since the producers of these catalogues now are taking into account the research upon human-computer interaction, we are also interested in finding out whether a web-based catalogue is more user-friendly than a more traditional OPAC. We do this by comparing the results of our examination with earlier studies of OPAC use.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the usability of the Umeå University Library catalogue Album. The aim is to evaluate the catalogue in order to establish if there are any problems that could be solved by modifying the catalogue. The following questions are answered: How should a good catalogue be designed? Which problems are common when using a Library catalogue? Is Album user friendly? Are there any problems that occur when using Album and how can the catalogue be changed to avoid the problems? To answer these questions I have performed a usability test in which five persons, all students, got to carry out twenty tasks in the catalogue and talk about what they were doing and thinking while doing the test. This method is a usability method called Think Aloud.

The aim of this study is to gain an understanding of how dyslexic adults experience the library, their meeting with a librarian and how they feel they are being helped with finding literature. To answer the purpose of the study I have conducted six semi-structured interviews with dyslexic adults.. Two theoretical models were used as an analytical tool in this study. One was Michael Buckland's aspects of access to information. The other is four aspects that explains the significance of personal encounter at the library.

This project had the aim to produce an exhibition catalogue for the ValandSchool of fine Arts (BA level). The purpose was to give the student a professionalfrontage and to visualize there exhibition concept through the catalogue.What elements, typography and shapes should be used for this purpose?How important is the physical format that the catalogue has?Through a massive sketch phase I came to see the difficulties in creating anexhibition catalogue. What type of images, shapes and expressions that couldrepresent the concept behind this specific art exhibition was hard to find.What shape should the catalogue have?The work became more than just making an exhibition catalogue, the cataloguehad to communicate the specific concept in a clear way.

This master?s thesis deals with the development of the Swedish Library catalogue. The thesis primarily has two purposes. Firstly, it describes how the Swedish Library catalogue has developed from its first appearance until today. As the Swedish library sector is very extensive the authors have chosen a few catalogues which they have studied more thoroughly.

The scope of this master´s thesis is the issue of usability in relation to interface design,in particular the interface of a university library´s online public accessed catalogue, orOPAC. Since the OPAC can be seen as the library´s ?shop window? to the world, it isof great importance that the interface to the OPAC can be used by patrons witheffectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction.The master´s thesis is based on a qualitative study performed at Karolinska InstitutetsUniversity library, and contains both a usability evaluation and an interview study. Twointerfaces were evaluated: a standard web interface provided by the system supplier, andan interface developed in-house by Karolinska Institutet´s systems department. The twointerfaces are both connected to the same online Library catalogue, thus making possiblea comparative study..

The purpose of this Master?s thesis is to study how well the online catalogue of The Music Library of Sweden works when ordinary users are searching for sheet music. The issues studied are: Why do the users fail to find the sheet music they are looking for? Do the users take advantage of the possibilities that the classification codes of the SAB system offer? If not, why?The source material of the study is 144 comments from a user questionnaire about the online catalogue and, in addition, the search log for one day (513 queries). The comments were sorted into seven groups depending on the type of information need, for example searches for certain instrumentation or genres and problems with spelling.

Literature and music as an expression of art have some parts in common, others can quite differ. Both are using a language, and both can exist in written representations. You can find such written or printed items in Library catalogues. The aim of this two years master's thesis is to examine how cataloguing of printed fiction-literature and printed music looks like, what differences you can find in cataloguing of printed literature and printed music.This study is based on a comparative methodology and two different theories are used. The first describes the common tasks for Library catalogues as they are known traditionally and recently (as FRBR-conceptual model), the other is a comparison of the two art-species literature (fiction) and music.This paper's first part is a comparison of how printed literature and printed music are catalogued in the Swedish national catalogue LIBRIS.

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.

How do you summarize the content of a fictional work, let?s sayLord of the Rings, into a few "telling" words that may represent it? This master?s thesis is a comparative study of how library users? freely chosen tags/keywords deviate from controlled vocabulary made by professional indexers when representing fiction. The thesis answers four main questions:? Do the tags that the library users give fictional works correspond to the categories used in professional indexing in Sweden?? Do the tags follow the standards for vocabulary, semantics and syntax used when indexing professionally?? Do the tags add something to document representations?? Are there differences between the tags used for adult fiction and the tags used for children?s literature?With a starting point in indexing theories of Frederick W. Lancaster, Annelise Pejtersen, and the semiotic theory of the indexing process of Jens-Erik Mai, 383 tags from totally 70 fictional works are analyzed.

This paper describes the development of direct and indirect service at the former Gothen­burg city library. This was during this period of time not the public library of the town, but a scientific library mostly serving the college, although also open to the public. Furthermore the services offered in Gothenburg are compared with those of the two old Swedish university libraries in Uppsala and Lund. The investigated direct serviceforms are "making material available", "guidance", and "localities". The indirect service areas are "the catalogue" and "the personnel and their competence".The conclusion is that the differences weren't that big and that Gothenburg city library was a modern library providing about the same services as you could find in Uppsala and Lund.

The aim of this masters thesis is to study the reliability of the URL as the link between a bibliographic record and a web resource. The Swedish catalogue services LIBRIS and NetSök have been evaluated on three different occasions, to study how these services have succeeded in giving access to web resources by using URLs. Because URLs are changeable, we have tried to find out common characteristics of the URLs in broken links. To accomplish this study we have used a quantitative approach and evaluated five percent of the web resources in the catalogues using a random selection. We have also used documentation relevant for our study, among other things to illustrate previous studies of the nature of web resources and alternative solutions to URLs as access points to web resources.

The aim of this thesis is to study the phenomenon of read/write OPAC by looking at how students at Pennsylvania University use PennTags in order to influence document descriptions in the Library catalogue. The main questions to be answered are to what extent PennTags is being used in different subject areas and what users contribute to document descriptions through tagging in different subject areas. Studying the posts created by a sample of PennTags users from a quantitative approach I try to find out if there is reason to believe that the activity of users and users? possibility to make meaningful contributions are dependent of the subject matter being dealt with in documents described, as anticipated by the theory of pace layering. I find that user interest in influencing the Library catalogue through PennTags appears to be low in general, with exception for in the subject areas of the main classes Language and literature and Social sciences in Library of Congress Classification.

The purpose of this Bachelor thesis is to examine how user-friendly the OPAC of the Märsta public library is considered to be.Theoretical basis are HCI and Allwoods definition of usability. Issues are: Is the OPAC suited to its task? Is the OPAC user-friendly? How well does a user accept the OPAC? and What degree of competence is shown by users of the OPAC? The source material consists of six interviews in the form of .avi files. The method I have chosen is qualitative semi-structured interview form. The result is that, based on Carl Martin Allwood?s defini-tion and with exception for the using of help-resources, the usability of Märsta?s library OPAC can be considered less good..