This Master Thesis has been performed at the department of Machine Design at KTH, The Royal Institute of Technology. The thesis has been a part of a global development project in collaboration with Luleå University of Technology, Lund Faculty of Engineering and Stanford University. Corporate liaison and sponsor has been Immerse Global Inc. The project was also performed on sponsorship from the Product Innovation Engineering Program, PIEp. The thesis is a representation of some of the contributions made by the authors.The lack of clean drinking water is one of the key issues facing the world today.

This Master Thesis investigates how the county administrative boards communicate the regional risk and vulnerability analyses to municipalities in Sweden. Information has been gathered through a survey and through a case study involving three county administrative boards. The results revealed that there are possibilities to improve or develop the communication in all the county administrative boards. The information channels are often written or web based, these channels promote one way communication rather than a dialog. The thesis gives suggestion on how to work out a strategy for a more effective communication, the case study also gives ideas on how a county administrative board can work with communication..

In order to facilitate design and maintenance of such a large and complex site as a nuclear power plant, all system functions must be described in a stringent way. In the past, these descriptions consisted of text documents and logical diagrams, but today there are an increasing number of object-oriented programs available on the market which might be used for this purpose. This Master Thesis has made a closer study of one of these programs named Rational Rose. The principal of the program is to facilitate software design and development, not to create models of plants. However, using the program the same way as developing software, specifying actors then gradually extend the model with use cases, use cases diagrams etc, the same methods can be used when modelling plants.

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 aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine how gender is described in some of the most popular children?s picture books in year 2007 and 2008. The theory used is based on Berger?s and Luckmann?s theory about Social construction, Bjerrum Nielsen?s and Rudberg?s theory about Gender socialization, Gens? theory How girls becomes women and boys becomes men and Hirdman?s theory about Gender contracts. The method used is an analysis of ideal types.

The purpous of this master?s thesis is to explore how the swedish public library evolved between 1890-1911, before the state implemented the library reform in 1912. The material used to cunduct the study concists mainly of texts published during the time frame of the thesis in the form of books, booklets and articles from Folkbiblioteksbladet, a journal dedicated to the subject of the swedish public library.Drawing upon Habermas theory of the structural transformation of the public sphere and Bourdieus theories about taste as social distinction and symbolic capital, the thesis seeks to show how the public participated in the evolvement of the public library and which aspects of society that contributed to the public library?s establishment as an institution. The findings are also discussed in relation to previous research of the history of the Swedish public library.

After the appointment of a new European Commission in 2004, ?communication? was made a top priority on the agenda. The Commission presented a new communication policy, which would establish a dialogue with the citizens, thereby bringing more democracy to the union and bridging the gap to the citizens. Three documents containing the policy were published, namely an internal action plan for the Commission, Plan D which establishes the framework for national debates and a whitepaper on EU communication policy. These documents were met by mistrust and criticism from many different actors such as journalists and experts.The aim of this Master Thesis is to examine this new communication policy from a deliberative democratic perspective.

In the spring of 2009 Silva Sweden AB was contacted for a collaboration within the scope of a MasterThesis project. The company had discussed the possibility to develop a device that monitors usermovement during different types of exercise. The objective of this Master Thesis has therefore been todevelop and design a multi training device that records the user?s physical performance during severalactivities. The purpose of the thesis project has been to use scientific methods for product development inorder to design a multi device that supplements Silva?s range of products.The project followed a product development process divided into four phases; Market Analysis, ConceptCreation, Concept Development and Construction.

We have produced a process mapping and from there developed a document management plan for the research service at the Labour Movement Archives and Library (ARAB) in Stockholm, Sweden. The project was conducted during five weeks in the spring of 2011 at ARAB and the resulting classification structure and document plan has been formulated and presented to the staff at a seminar. We found that the institution in some cases were suffering from an inadequate documentation in a number of the identified processes, and also in their records management and archiving. In this additional memorandum follows an analyzing discussion of activity-based document- and archive management, e-archives and process mapping. We have accordingly tried to standardize the process of research services and contribute to a more adequate document management within the institution.

The task in this Master Thesis was to design and construct a prototype of a satellite antenna driver unit. The unit is to be robust and work in cold weather down to -40°C, so that it can be mounted on the roof of a minibus. A microcontroller controls the H-bridges simultaneous, each connected to an electrical motor. Hardware and software protections were implemented to ensure that the antenna can not turn outside its allowed area and risk breaking. The unit can output voltages at many different levels and communicate at a multitude of signal standards..

This Master's thesis discusses the freedom of speech, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas in the context of public libraries in Sweden. The scope of this thesis is to examine the acquisition and maintenance of the literature about the killing of Sweden's Prime Minister Olof Palme 1986. This literature will serve as an instrument to measure the extent to which Swedish public libraries adhere to the rules set by the Swedish parliament, United Nations' universal declaration of human rights article 19, UNESCO's public library manifesto and the principles of the Federation of Library Associations and Institutions..

The aim of this two years Master Thesis in Library and information science is to study the foundation Centrum för lättläst and its work regarding information use with focus on information structures and information needs. The aim is also to examine how Centrum för lättläst cooperate with Swedish libraries to promote the work concerning people with reading disabilities. This Master Thesis applies a domain analytic theory and method inspired by Birger Hjørland. The domain analysis is confined to examine ontology, epistemology, sociology, empirical user studies, document and genre studies and studies of structures and institutions in scientific communication. The main source material consists of information from the homepage of Centrum för lättläst.

The purpose of this master's thesis is to examine and compare the process of starting a school library at schools which haven't had a school library before, and to examine and compare the experience of this process according to the principals and the persons responsible for the school library.I have examined two Swedish independent primary schools (age 6-15 years). I have made qualitative interviews with the principals and the persons responsible for the new school library. In all, I have made seven interviews. As requested by the new Swedish Educational Act, both schools had recently started creating school libraries. One of the schools had recruited a half-time teacher-librarian and the other had no staffing at all.In the interviews, I have examined the attitudes of the informants towards school libraries, if this attitude has changed during the process of starting the school library, the informants' experiences during this process and the informants' views on the school library as an agent for student achievement.

The main subject with this Master Thesis is to take a closer look at university libraries specially Gothenburg University Librarys operation of marketing the librarys user contact, how it receives various users demands and carry out the interactive and strategic marketing. Marketing is planning, structuring, implementation, analysis and controls of carefully formulated programs, designed to bring voluntary interactions and relations with the target markets, for the purpose of achieving organisational and user satisfaction objectives. The structure of this thesis covers three main parts. Part I reflects the researchers approach to the subject. Marketing researchers such as Grönroos, Kotler, Bryson, De Sáez and Gummesson among others are presented.

This two years master?s thesis is about book circles for children, arranged by the public libraries in Sweden. The purpose is to gain knowledge about how children experience their participation in book circles, and how they experience their own reading. It focuses on children aged 10 to 12 years, and their leisure reading. The research questions are: What are the book circles? function for the participants? How and why do the children read? What kind of literature do they like? Do the children experience that their reading has developed through their participation in the book circles? What parts of the reading process do the book circles influence?The theoretical framework is threefold.