AbstractThis report was undertaken at the request of the Management and maintenancedepartment of Swedish National Road Authority (Vägverket Region Sydöst) inJönköping.In 1992, the management and maintenance of Swedish roads were laid out onexternal contractors. When putting out a tender for the work, the foundation isfrom a national set of rules which are in constant change. This report is limited towinter road upkeep.The trend in the invitation for tenders is that it is moving from the moreconventional executional demands towards the less controlling demands. Thedownside of functional, less controlling demands is that it is difficult to articulatehow to measure them. The order authority therefore has to find ways to makesure to get what has been paid for.In connection to the invitation for tender of winter road upkeep for 2005, the newset of rules, ATB Vinter 2003 was deployed.The main purpose of this thesis is to see which the big changes in the set of rulesare and how these changes affect the organisation and activities of the contractor.It is also studied how the changes in execution is perceived by road users and howit affects the possibilities of the contractor to come as a newcomer to a new areaof administration.Interviews and examination of sets of rules has led to a list of a number ofchanges that the contractors feel affect their work in any sense.Views from road users that have come in to the order authority have beenscrutinized to see how they have experienced the change.

The aim of this thesis is to mediate to the reader an image of Chinese classification systems and in what way the methods of classification have progressed during time. The tradition of classification in China is very old and dates back more than two thousand years, but it wasnt until the downfall of the dynastic era in the beginning of the 20th century, that Chinese libraries and methods of classification were modernized. This thesis also identifies the development of Chinese librarianship which is of old age since Chinese literature stretches three thousand years back. The main question is in what way the values of three different philosophies are reflected in five classification systems compiled between 1953-1975. The three philosophies are Daoism, Confucianism and Maoism/Mao Zedong Thought.

The purpose of this Master's thesis is to examine the decision-process concerning public art in Borås municipality. My questions have been from where the initiatives come, who the decision-makers are, how the decisions are taken and which questions are discussed. I have examined this through partly interviews with the members of the deciding organ in Borås municipality, partly through literary studies. I have also analysed texts such as debates and protocols from the Swedish parliament. I have also been present at two of the committees meetings.

Librarians like to think that libraries contribute substantially to the progress of research. However, libraries still seem to have serious problems getting integrated in their parent organization on equal terms with other parts of that organization. The degree of integration of the library is thus the main topic of this thesis and the purpose is to examine how the interaction between librarians and scientists is formed and can be developed. That issue leads to concrete questions concerning what part librarians play in the scientists work and which factors influence the cooperation or lack of cooperation. We have chosen, for reasons of comparison, to make two case studies; one is a branch of a university library and the other is a library in a large pharmaceutical company.

With the purpose of finding the motives behind use, production and reuse of Open Educational Resources (OER), the writer has conducted a qualitative survey. The three main questions in this two years master?s thesis are:? Why do people use others? unmodified OER?? Why do people produce OER?? Why do people alter and reuse OER?The theoretic framework is built around Manuel Castells? network society, with its social and efficiency seeking dimension, along with the Knowledge commons. Some pedagogy is included as well.A web survey was distributed to 796 users of the Connexions OER repository. 95 responses were received.

In the paper we bring up and analyse the attitudes librarianshave towards youth and youth programs in the public library.The purpose is to raise awareness among librarians and tomake the process of change and development. We have usedsemi structured interviews in order to answer our researchquestions and conducted the interviews with five librarians incharge of the youth programs in different public libraries. Inthese interviews we asked about their views on youth as auser group, youth programs and how this affects theiropinions on the roles of the public library. We have also triedto see how the librarian?s opinions differ from how thelibrary runs their youth programs today.We have used two different models as theoretic framework.One of them has defined three different roles of the publiclibrarian and is constructed by Maj Klasson and the other is adeveloped version of Andersson & Skot-Hansen?s classicmodel of the roles of the public library made by Jochumsen,Rasmussen & Skot-Hansen.

The aim of this bachelor?s thesis is to gain deeper knowledge about how librarians in public libraries in Sweden view theirprofessional role with regard to the last decades of change in the library field. Especially concerning the technical evolution and towards a higher user orientation and market mindset, and in which ways this has influenced the librarians everyday working tasks. A particular focus has been placed towards the reference transaction, the use of computers and e-media, and the stock development. We believe that there currently is a changeover, from the libraries traditional line of function, towards them as more of service institutions.The method used in this study for answering the research questions and to gather empirical information is semi-structuredinterviews.

Since January 1st 2005 all companies listed on a regulated stock exchange within the European Union are required to present their financial reports in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). The intention of the introduction of IFRS is to achieve international harmonization of accounting rules in order to make financial reports more comparable between companies from different countries. The purpose of financial reports presented in accordance with IFRS is to provide information that is useful to the users of the information. The aim of this paper is to investigate whether the information regarding goodwill and the goodwill impairment test, presented in accordance with IFRS, in fact is useful to a specific group of accounting information users, namely equity analysts. An empirical study is conducted, based on interviews with seven Swedish equity analysts.

TeliaSonera har sedan ett tag tillbaka inlett ett projekt med ett antal företag inom byggbranschen. Projektet går ut på att ta fram kontrolltekniker som kontinuerligt mäter en byggnads tillstånd genom hela dess livstid, så att eventuella brister kan upptäckas innan de blir till ett problem. Med andra ord är tanken att ha någon form av teknik som kontinuerligt avläser diverse egenskaper i en byggnad som exempelvis fuktighetshalten i väggarna, om ventilationen fungerar som den ska och halten av olika ämnen i luften.Det praktiska syftet var att verifiera om trenden kontinuerlig kontrollmätning efterfrågas genom att ta kontakt med branschexperter inom såväl byggbranschen som vissa andra parallella branscher och se om även de uppmärksammat denna. Under antagandet att de gjort det, var intentionen vidare att försöka urskilja de så kallade lead users. Lead users är användare vilka erfar behov före marknaden som helhet samt som är benägna till att vara innovativa, då en lösning på deras behov förväntas medföra stor nytta för dem.

The purpose of this master thesis is to investigate the understanding of children's librari-ans regarding children's needs and preconditions in a library context and based on devel-opmental psychology and information seeking theories. The children's perspective is said to be the guiding star in the children's library and the thesis also aims to study the chil-dren's perspective as defined by children's librarians.The master thesis is a qualitative study based on interviews with children's librarians working at major public libraries. Observations of the children's libraries in the study have to some extent been performed.The study reveals that children's librarians are fairly knowledgeable about children but do not to a full extent use that knowledge into adapting the library to children and their needs. The children are not contributing to the adaptation of the library to any extent as there are few routines for that matter. In society in general children are on a regular basis represented by adults and their perspective on children and children's needs, which may differ from the perspective children have on their own lives, and the same is applicable for the children's library.

The “peer to peer” (P2P) is a technology of downloading and filesharing between online - Internet - users by the mean of specified software. Since June 1999, the Napster software has made the happiness of millions of individuals who used it to obtain and share free audio files Mp3. Rapidly, the major recording companies have prosecuted the Napster Company and managed to force it to close down. They were arguing against it for it is supporting the development on a large scale traffic of files protected by copyright and thus was threatening the whole music and movies economic world. Since fast Internet connections multiplied, "peer to peer" software and networks improved, so that this mode of exchange became an unprecedented success. Today all cultural products, in particular films and music, are concerned with this free –of– charge distribution without any financial counterpart for the copyright holders. Two tools hold today the top ranks and concentrate large traffic: eDonkey and eMule.

In the town of Väderstad which lies in the middle of Sweden, called Östergötland is Väderstad-Verken situated. It´s an international company which produce machines for land processing and sown to farmers all over the world. Väderstad-Verken is an expansive company with 750 employees. The turnover is 1.4 billion sek. Rapid seed-sower has become a popular machine since it was introduced in 1991.

The aim of the study was to investigate the performance of postlingually deaf adults on parts of the swedish dysarthria test Dysartribedömningen, and to compare these results with a matched group consisting of normal hearing speakers without any known speech disorder. The group consisted of 17 participants ranging between 42-86 years of age. Participants were assessed focusing on articulation, prosody, intelligibility and through a self-assessment of communicative participation. There was a statistically significant difference between groups on prosody that manifested primarily as a slower speaking rate in the cochlear implant users. No significant differences between groups as to articulation, intelligibility or communicative participation could be found.

The smartphone is part of our daily life. Smartphone users type on a screen area that is no larger than the palm of a hand. To help with this endeavor the software known as AutoCorrect was created. However little is known about how AutoCorrect actually change the language and if AutoCorrect users at all perceive the impact it has. This study aims to find out if our test subjects are aware of AutoCorrect?s presence and how much it influences them.

In this thesis I have chosen to study the use of crowdsourcing in Swedish archival institutions as well as the influence this methodic platform has on the work of modern archivists. This also raises the question whether the nature of the platform is in any way influenced by the attitude working professionals might have towards crowdsourcing as a legitimed working method. This investigation is based on case studies and interviews with archivists from select Swedish institutions and also the methodology of two now ongoing crowdsourcing projects.The theoretical framework on which this composition is based comes from the work of Gregory Asmolov and his work on crowdsourcing platforms and their functionality as tools of governing. Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) is applied to analyze how the method of crowdsourcing is utilised by archival institutions and influenced by their daily routine in conjunction with Governmentality as the chosen way of studying how these platforms might control their users.From the results of the performed case studies, two discourses emerged based on the view on quality concerning gathered information amongst the involved subjects. The first of these discourses places it´s trust and faith in users themselves where validity is of a lesser concern than the actual availability of information through the concept of ?wisdom of the crowds?.