AbstractThe Swedish Road Administration in the region of Mälardalen has since 2004 worked to in¬crease the efficiency of the maintance of bridges based on limited functional requirements and time demanded action.The maintenance of the bridges is contracted in the county of Uppsala since 2004, and Örebro since 2007. The county of Nyköping and Västerås is contracted by the traditional system. The contractor will perform a regular maintenance on all bridges. The bridges are inspected by the contractor at least once every year.The contractor registers the result of the inspection in a database called BaTMan. BaTMan is a Bridge and Tunnel Management system and is a strictly web solution were the user logs in via the internet.The Swedish Road Administration also inspects the bridges to se that the demands on the bridges are followed.My work is to compare these different inspections and to see any development..

In 1997, the Swedish parliament adopted a decision on Vision Zero (nollvision) in the road and transport system. Vision Zero means that no one should be killed or seriously injured in traffic accidents in the road transport system (Prop. 2003/04: 160). For the Transport Administration in Sweden (Trafikverket), this means increased demands on security and signage at road work sites around the country. This in turn means increased demands on the contractors that carry out road work for the Transport Administration.

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.

In this Bachelor?s essay we discuss whether eWOM (electronic word-of-mouth) is perceived as advertisement or as normal information, which is not influenced by any company, on the platform Facebook. The information which we were interested in is the one spread by normal users, and user?s perception of it. To find our results we have conducted a study in which we have used the method interview, which gives qualitative results.

As trucks are getting more and more advanced, information about their weight has become a key factor for controlling them in a more fuel efficient and safe manner. Knowing the mass of a heavy duty vehicle in real time has been a difficult challenge for the truck manufacturers. With the processing power for electronic control units in trucks steadily increasing, more advanced algorithms for calculating the mass has been developed, but at the moment there still is a wish for better performance.Since there is a lack of good information regarding the external forces acting on the vehicle, forces that depends on the slope of the road, foundation of the road and the wind, the methods have to be able to disregard these. Such an approach, based on an indirect least square solution, has been evaluated in this thesis. The results have been promising and based on these a recommendation about further evaluation has been made..

The purpose of this study was to develop recommendations for using more efficient lighting and better graphic design to create a more uniform structure in the exhibition hall ?Road to the past? in Jönköping County Museum by answering the following questions at issue:1) How are the objects in the exhibition hall ?Road to the past? exposed today?2) How can you use lighting and graphic design to create structure in the exhibition and strengthen the expression in the exhibition?Our work is based on observations and open group interviews. We observed the exhibition hall ?Road to the past? during day and evening. In the same hall, we observed a guided tour that we followed up with open group interviews.

The purpose of this study was to look for tendencies that social media can contribute to exposing users to a stronger perception of opinion polarization, and further to see if the daily presence of social networking sites can put normative pressure on the users. The study was made using a survey with participants from Umea? University during the time frame of november-december 2014. The theoretical framework behind the study was mainly drawn from The Spiral Of Silence by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann and was further supplemented with more current research, studying the effects from The Spiral Of Silence in the modern and more fragmented media landscape that exists now then when her theory was written. Further theoretical tools for analysis of the results came from Michel Foucault and his discussions in Discipline and punish, specifically his views on how surveillance can be discontinous in practice, but still permanent in it?s effects.The results of this study indicates that social media users tend to isolate themselves from uncomfortable opinions, and do not follow or read opinions they do not already agree with.

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.

Syftet med uppsatsen är att studera beteende hos lead users angående deras förvaring ochkonsumtion av kaffe. Genom att göra en jämförelse med icke lead users har vi undersöktom lead users uppvisar ett avvikande beteende. Vi har även utifrån svaren kunnat geförslag på lösningar om hur kaffeförvaring kan utformas och förbättras.Utifrån 40 intervjuer med kaffekonsumenter har vi försökt urskilja lead users. Vi harutgått från en modell som vi utvecklat tillsammans och som bygger på tidigare teorier. Vihar poängsatt alla frågor och multiplicerat med viktningsgraden.

The aim of this thesis is to study through discourse analysis how users talk about librarians and the librarian profession and what perceptions they have regarding it. I have tried to do this by asking the questions: How do the users describe librarians and the librarian profession? Are there any patterns in what they say? The method and theory I have used is Laclau and Mouffes? discourse theory and partially structured interviews. The material consists of interviews with eight users that are both women and men, both students and members of the public and they were between 25 and 50 years old. In the material I found two discourses: the discourse about librarians and the discourse about the librarian profession.

"Outstanding" or "They ought to know more about computers" : A study on computer support at university libraries.The main purpose of this study is to investigate the support computer users are given at university libraries. Further, the aim is to find out if the users thought they received the support that they needed. The study is carried out at two different university libraries. The data is obtained through interviews with the librarians, observations of the daily work at the information counters and questionnaires handled out to the users.The study indicates that variables such as knowledge, time and equipment play a central role in making the computer support successive. To a great extent the computer support is synonymous with information search, but it also deals with word processing and technical support connected with computer errors.

Almost all Swedes today have access to the Internet, if not through the home then via the library or work. Despite this, around 20% of the population stand outside the information society in that they lack in knowledge, assistive usability tools or positive attitude towards technology and its influence on society. The main factors influencing the digital divide in today's society are age, disability and education, while the main reason for staying outside seems to be disinterest.The question about digital inclusion is important as we now stand on the breaking-point between a society where the industry has had a prominent position for private as well as national economy and a digital society where access to the Internet is no longer about prestige, but where significant differences between users' knowledge levels can create a power gap. Gaps in access and use not only reflects already existing socio-economic conditions, but can also maintain and enhance these.It is crucial for the future expansion of Internet usage how today's non-users feel about becoming users. To understand what underlies the motivations not to use computers is one of the keys to get non-users to embrace becoming users.

The main aim of this master thesis was to see the process of an interactive online reference service from idea to final product. The reference service we have studied is developed and used by the Library of the National Institute for Working Life in Stockholm, Sweden and goes by the name phibi. Our goal was to review the whole realization process from the reasons why a service like this was created, how the service was introduced and implemented inside the organisation and finally what the result and consequences were for both the library staff and for the users of the service. Phibi is designed to be a tool that fosters communication between the library staff and the remote users where the users get the opportunity to be helped with their questions by the library staff although they are not physically present in the library. To understand the process we conducted a case study with 11 interviews of the library staff, the superior and the initiator to phibi.

The study was carried out as a time study of five wood chippers placed on trucks,so?called huggbilar. They are trucks with built?in wood chipper, chip bowl and crane pulling a chip trailer. The system is used for chipping wood fuel, transporting, and delivering the chips to heating plants.

The aim of this thesis was to look closer into the shelf arrangement and user behavior in a fiction collection with the municipal library in Lund as an example. The purpose was to investigate to what extent the shelf arrangement in this library is adapted to the behavior of users when it comes to searching for and choosing fiction. The study is mainly focused on the division between Hc- and Hce-classified books (Swedish fiction and fiction translated into Swedish), the special shelving of the publications of the last five years, and the genre categorization. The user behavior is primarily examined from the perspective of three search strategies; looking for a specific author or title, browsing within a genre or browsing without having a specific genre in mind. The study also deals with within which genres of fiction the users are searching and if they are looking for a book that is translated or not, new or older.