There is an ongoing evolution in scholarly communication. The traditional way of communicating scholarly results through scientific journals is beginning to be replaced by other means of dissemination. One new channel for scholars to communicate their results is digital publication in so-called open archives. An open archive is a kind of full text database, where a scholar may archive/publish his or her articles, as a complement or a substitute to publishing in scientific journals. There are discipline-oriented archives and institutional archives.

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.

The aim of this study is to analyze and describe the research front within information science. To reach this purpose we ask the following research question: Which research themes can be identified within the subject field of information science by using bibliographic coupling in combination with cluster analysis.The data for our study consists of articles from the journals Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology and Journal of Documentation throughout the years 2004-2006. The bibliographic information from the articles was analyzed with the combined methods of bibliographic coupling and cluster analysis. This gave fifteen clusters within which we identified research themes. When analyzing these results we found four main fields of research within the research front of information science: Information retrieval, bibliometrics, knowledge organization and information science as research discipline.

This master's thesis reports on our investigation of how the public librarian's professional identity is formed and what it is formed of. We have considered factors such as: education, competence and daily tasks. In order to fulfil this aim we have used a literature study on concepts such as competence, education, professional identity and profession. We have also carried out an empirical study where we have interviewed nine librarians on public libraries. The method of analysis is qualitative.

This essay is a survey of thirteen user studies performed in the field of image retrieval. The purpose is to try to distinguish principles that should be kept in mind when wanting to make image databases available for a wide and varied group of users. The essay tries to answer two questions, namely: Are there any results in accordance among the different studies? What in the user studies should be considered when it comes to how content description, interface and functions for searching can be designed when creating systems for image retrieval? Each study is first reviewed on its own, and then a comparative analysis of all the studies is carried out. Derived from the result of this analysis, the conclusion is presented in the form of a row of suggestions to which aspects are to be suitably included in the design of image databases.

A fauna passage is a way for animals to cross roads separated from the traffic. In Sweden, there are an unknown number of passages with different functions and appearances. These passages would, with the question ?Which fauna passages can be found in Sweden, and how well do they work?? as a base, be compiled in a comparable way. This would be done with a number of questions asked to the different regions of Vägverket.

The Arctic region is rich in natural resources such as oil, gas, minerals and fish. Climate change causes the Arctic ice melt, making resource extraction possible as well as opening up new transport routes through the Northwest Passage and the Northeast Passage. This has led to competition and cross-border strife among the Arctic States. The two largest states in the Arctic are Russia and Canada, which are also members of the Arctic Council. Russia and Canada are at the moment involved in several disputes regarding the Arctic territory where the ownership of the North Pole is one example.

Ålen är en utrotningshotad art som under sin livscykel vandrar mellan hav och sötvatten eller bräckvatten. Ålen som vandrar till sjöar och vattendrag utsätts för vandringshinder, bland annat i form av vattenkraftverk, som hindrar ålen från att ta sig både till och från havet. Att skapa förbipassager vid kraftverken är ett möjligt sätt att hjälpa blankålen vid dess vandring till havet. Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka om ålen föredrar en flyktväg vid vattenytan eller vid botten vid nedströms passage av ett vattenkraftverk. Studien utfördes vid Alsters vattenkraftverk i Alsterälven, strax öster om Karlstad.

The aim of this master's thesis is to investigate and to explain the concept of folksonomy in the perspective of knowledge organisation. By creating a conceptual explanation and defining what folksonomy as a concept consists of, the intent is to establish a basis for evaluating folksonomy and to discuss what relevance folksonomy may have in the field of knowledge organisation. By applying a qualitative content analysis a review is performed on how folksonomy is perceived and discussed in a selection of articles written on the subject. Employing the theory of classification, subject indexing and bibliographic retrieval, folksonomy as a method for knowledge organisation is analysed. The practice of tagging in existing systems is also studied.

The purpose of this study is to investigate childrens possibilities to retrieve information by searching in searching engines designed for children. Two such search engines are examined: Yahooligans and Kids Click, both of which index pages in English only. I have compared Yahooligans with its equivalence for adults; Yahoo, by evaluating the retrieval effectiveness. Some functions in Kids Click and in Yahooligan are investigated. Seven class room studies are described in the prior research chapter.

This thesis discusses main problems associated with dictionary-based Cross-Language Information Retrieval as lexical and translational ambiguity of query terms, translation of compounds and phrases, dictionary limitation. The purpose of the study is to investigate how query structure influences the effectiveness of CLIR regarding performance of three query types: original query, unstructured query and structured query. Query structuring refers to the application of #syn-operator to group query terms. The study comprises an experiment that was performed in the InQuery IR system with TrecUta database that contains 550,000 news articles from different American newspapers. 24 topics were used for the experiment.

Our state of emergency is good - is the public library prepared for the future?Our state of emergency is good! These are the words spoken by Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson in 1939. He claimed that Sweden had nothing to fear from a future war, we were safe. Today we know it was not so. Is this the situation for Swedish public library of today? Is the public library ready to face the future, or is it only fancy words?We have to form the future, not let the future form us.

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.

I den här uppsatsen analyseras Ibn Fadlans beskrivning av rûs hövdingabegravning. Till skillnad från tidigare dekontextuell forskning sätts fokus på det kontextuella. Begravningen beskrivs som en livskris där olika maktförhållanden uppstår. Olika sociala relationer inom gruppen lyfts fram.Ibn Fadlan beskriver hur gods och föremål strukturerades och förbrukades i och runt gravhögen. De kan liknas vid rituella objekt och kan knytas till rûs vardagliga sedvänjor och deras ekonomiska förhållanden.

Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka problem samt lösningar i relation till informationsåtervinning över språkliga gränser. Metoden som har använts i uppsatsen är studier av forskningsmaterial inom lingvistik samt främst den relativt nya forskningsdisciplinen Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR). I uppsatsen hävdas att världens alla olikartade språk i dagsläget måste betraktas som ett angeläget problem för informationsvetenskapen, ty språkliga skillnader utgör ännu ett stort hinder för den internationella informationsåtervinning som tekniska framsteg, uppkomsten av Internet, digitala bibliotek, globalisering, samt stora politiska förändringar i ett flertal länder runtom i världen under de senaste åren tekniskt och teoretiskt sett har möjliggjort. I uppsatsens första del redogörs för några universellt erkända lingvistiska skillnader mellan olika språk ? i detta fall främst med exempel från europeiska språk ? och vanliga problem som dessa kan bidra till angående översättningar från ett språk till ett annat.