The aim of this thesis was to evaluate the music downloading service Musikwebb regarding its indexing and retrieval effectiveness. This was done by performing various kinds of search in the system. The outcome of these searches were then analysed according to the criteria specificity, precision, recall, exclusivity and authority control. The study showed that Musikwebb had several flaws regarding its retrieval effectiveness. The most prominent cases were the criteria exclusivity and specificity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine different methods for organisation and retrieval of pop and rock music recordings, and the problems concerned with this organisation. The focus is the question whether values towards pop and rock music influence the organisation of music in major Swedish record collections. As a background for this discussion, the study also discusses how music is organised in these collections, and what kind of problems are associated with their organisation. Also included in the paper is a minor investigation of how problems with the organisation of pop and rock music are dealt with in library and information science, and how values towards pop and rock music are dealt with in society in general. The main focus of the study, however, is an empirical study of how values towards pop and rock music manifest themselves in the pop and rock organisation of six Swedish institutions with major collections of music recordings.

The aim of this thesis is to describe passage retrieval (PR), with basis in results from various empirical experiments, and to critically investigate different approaches in PR. The main questions to be answered in the thesis are: (1) What characterizes PR? (2) What approaches have been proposed? (3) How well do the approaches work in experimental information retrieval (IR)? PR is a research topic in information retrieval, which instead of retrieving the fulltext of documents, that can lead to information overload for the user, tries to retrieve the most relevant passages in the documents. This technique was investigated studying a number of central articles in the research field. PR can be divided into three different types of approaches based on the segmentation of the documents.

This thesis deals with one of the main questions within information science: The question about controlled and uncontrolled vocabulary and which of the two that are most effective when it comes to retrieve relevant information from electronic databases. The method used here is literature studies. I have described and examined five empirical studies which has been done in purpose to compare the effectiveness in retrieval with controlled and uncontrolled vocabulary, in the way they are used in retrieval of information in databases. The studies I have examined have also used recall and precision as a value to measure the effectiveness of retrieval. The studies which I have chosen is also limited to deal only with studies that have been done in bibliographic databases.

The purpose of this essay is to examine how high school students (age 13 to 19) search for information on the web and in databases. Furthermore, it aims to look into how critical of sources they are. The questions asked was: how the students search for information in digital media? Which kind of sources do the students use? How they evaluate the information they find? Do they get any education in information retrieval and source evaluation? To answer these questions students were interviewed in groups about their information retrieval behavior. Furthermore two school librarians were interviewed about their experience of the students? information retrieval.During the interviews it was clear that the students had received quite sparse instructions on the subjects of information retrieval and criticism of the sources.

This is a study in the field of Music information retrieval (MIR) concerning classification of musicgenre. The study uses a music listening experiment and machine learning methods to determinewhether or not the drum sounds from different songs contain sufficient information to classifygenre.MIR methods are used to extract data from the audio signals. The data is used together with theclassification results of the listening experiment to train different machine learning algorithms toclassify the songs in different genres.The results indicate that using only drum sounds for genre classifications works well, both forlisteners and for machine learning methods..

The aim of this study was to compare the Query-by-Humming systems Midomi, Musicline and Tunebot regarding their retrieval effectiveness. The aim was to see if there were differences between the systems but also between the user groups common users, musicians and singers. Query-by-Humming system means that the user sings a tune that the system then use to find the right melody.To compare the systems and their users, queries where collected from the different user groups and replayed for the systems. Mean Reciprocal Rank and Friedman test was used to do the comparison.The results showed that the system did not achieve equivalent and that there were no difference between the user groups. The Mean Reciprocal Rank showed that the systems had very different retrieval effectiveness, where Midomi was the system with best result and Musicline with the lowest result..

The aim with this thesis came out of a strong interest for Passage Retrieval. Our intention has not been to evaluate an IR-system. Instead our goal has been to analyze the result of indexing documents and their passages. We have been studying the weights of the different terms in the different indices, in comparison with other parameters like frequency, normalized frequency and the inversed document frequency. Further more we have been looking at how the weights are spread using for instance the standard deviation.

This master thesis deals with events, dynamics and problems of mediated information seeking within the context of a new information service called "Book a librarian". The study, based on a survey and interviews both in academic and public libraries and participant observations in academic libraries, has its theoretical base in the cognitive theory of information retrieval interaction. The cognitive view is used to throw light upon the need of an ongoing dialogue during the session in order to detect the information needs of the user and to conduct a successful retrieval of information. The communicative interaction is seen as threepart interaction between the intermediary, the user and the information system, where the current cognitive states of all three participants are involved. The study shows that the cognitive obstacles for a successful mediation and information retrieval are mostly connected to participants current knowledge of the subject and of the retrieval techniques.

This Master?s thesis examines different retrieval strategies used in cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). The aim was to investigate if there were any differences between baseline queries and translated queries in retrieval effectiveness; how the retrieval effectiveness was affected by query structuring and if the results differed between different languages. The languages used in this study were Swedish, English and Finnish. 30 topics from the TrecUta collection were translated into Swedish and Finnish.

The aim of this Masters thesis is, partly, to examine the information needs of lesbians: what discernable information needs they have, how they seek information and which information sources they use. The purpose is also to examine what part fiction plays regarding the information needs mentioned above and how fiction indexing could improve retrieval. The study is conducted through ten qualitative interviews with lesbians as well as through textual analysis. The theoretical framework includes queer theory and theory concerning information needs and uses. The results indicate that lesbians have evident information needs that mostly concern identity.

This paper aims to examine how, and if, music is being used integrated in other subjects thanmusic in school. The study is based on qualitative interviews and I haveinterviewed fourteachers, regardless of whether they use music a lot or not.The questions the study is basedon are if there might be a connection between theteachers' own feelings for music andwhether they use music inschool or not, how music is being used and does the use of musicgive any effects?The result of this study shows that there can be a connection between the teachers ownsfeelings for music and the fact if they use music when they teach or not. One of the teachersI?ve interviewed had bad music experiences and didnot use music in her teaching.

This paper aims to examine how, and if, music is being used integrated in other subjects thanmusic in school. The study is based on qualitative interviews and I haveinterviewed fourteachers, regardless of whether they use music a lot or not.The questions the study is basedon are if there might be a connection between theteachers' own feelings for music andwhether they use music inschool or not, how music is being used and does the use of musicgive any effects?The result of this study shows that there can be a connection between the teachers ownsfeelings for music and the fact if they use music when they teach or not. One of the teachersI?ve interviewed had bad music experiences and didnot use music in her teaching.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the three main translation methods used in experimental Cross-language Information Retrieval CLIR research today, namely translation using either machine-readable dictionaries, machine translation systems or corpus-based methods. Working notes from research groups participating in the Text Retrieval Conference TREC and the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum CLEF between 1997 and 2000 have provided the main source material used to discuss the possible advantages and drawbacks that each method presents. It appears that all three approaches have their pros and cons, and because the different researchers tend to favour their own chosen method, it is not possible to establish a "winner approach" to CLIR translation by studying the working notes alone. One should remember however that the present interest in cross-language-applications of information retrieval has arisen as late as in the 1990s, and thus the research is yet in its early stages. The methods discussed in this paper may well be improved, or perhaps replaced by others in the future..

This paper aims to examine how, and if, music is being used integrated in other subjects thanmusic in school. The study is based on qualitative interviews and I haveinterviewed fourteachers, regardless of whether they use music a lot or not.The questions the study is basedon are if there might be a connection between theteachers' own feelings for music andwhether they use music inschool or not, how music is being used and does the use of musicgive any effects?The result of this study shows that there can be a connection between the teachers ownsfeelings for music and the fact if they use music when they teach or not. One of the teachersI?ve interviewed had bad music experiences and didnot use music in her teaching.