<p>The purpose of this thesis is to examine the usability of the Umeå University library catalogue Album. The aim is to evaluate the catalogue in order to establish if there are any problems that could be solved by modifying the catalogue. The following questions are answered: How should a good catalogue be designed? Which problems are common when using a library catalogue? Is Album user friendly? Are there any problems that occur when using Album and how can the catalogue be changed to avoid the problems? To answer these questions I have performed a usability test in which five persons, all students, got to carry out twenty tasks in the catalogue and talk about what they were doing and thinking while doing the test. This method is a usability method called Think Aloud. After the test the users got to answer twenty interview questions about the catalogue. The material obtained from the test was analyzed and positive factors, problems and courses of action were picked out. The results of the study show that the hardest thing for the users is to perform subject searches. It is not clear what subject and classification is and the users don’t know how to search the Index. They also think it’s hard to know in which fields to search and which words to use. In this thesis I give suggestions to things that could be changed in Album to make it more user friendly and easy to use. Although there are some problems with the catalogue, the overall impression of Album seems to be positive among the users.</p>

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the usability of the Umeå University library catalogue Album. The aim is to evaluate the catalogue in order to establish if there are any problems that could be solved by modifying the catalogue. The following questions are answered: How should a good catalogue be designed? Which problems are common when using a library catalogue? Is Album user friendly? Are there any problems that occur when using Album and how can the catalogue be changed to avoid the problems? To answer these questions I have performed a usability test in which five persons, all students, got to carry out twenty tasks in the catalogue and talk about what they were doing and thinking while doing the test. This method is a usability method called Think Aloud. After the test the users got to answer twenty interview questions about the catalogue. The material obtained from the test was analyzed and positive factors, problems and courses of action were picked out. The results of the study show that the hardest thing for the users is to perform subject searches. It is not clear what subject and classification is and the users don’t know how to search the Index. They also think it’s hard to know in which fields to search and which words to use. In this thesis I give suggestions to things that could be changed in Album to make it more user friendly and easy to use. Although there are some problems with the catalogue, the overall impression of Album seems to be positive among the users.

Univ., Diss.--Uppsala, 2002.

The starting point of this thesis is that there are students who do not have an appropriate study environment at home and are dependent on the library to find a suitable place to work. Through an analysis of interviews conducted with students and librarians, this thesis aims to contribute knowledge about different perspectives on the study environment and on so called 'resources' of the library. Examples of resources are books and databases. The thesis is accomplished through a comparison of how a student group and a university librarian group view the students' needs of the library as a study environment and how they are met by a university library. Central in the interviews with both groups were the participants' understanding of the library as a study environment and a place for studying. It was also highlighted that a lot of group studies take place in the library because there are few other manned areas at the university. Generally, the participants had a positive view on the study environment at the library. The thesis concludes that the library is used as a study environment both for group and individual studies. The thesis is inconclusive regarding whether the students' needs are met. The students and librarians mostly agreed on how they view the resources of the library. The students' and librarians' view of the students' need of the library's study environment did not differ much.

The aim of this study was to explore bibliometrics for evaluation and research support, with emphasis on humanities and social sciences. A literature review was combined with an empirical evaluation of qualitative interviews with librarians and bibliometricians from selected academic libraries. Dahler-Larsen’s theories on the evaluation society were applied, as well as Abbott’s theoretical models of the professionalization of librarians. The first part of the analysis consists of a qualitative content analysis of the interview material. The second part investigates the competencies of librarians and bibliometricians and the challenging aspects of bibliometric analysis for the humanities and social sciences, within Abbott’s framework. The majority of the studied universities used the Norwegian model for bibliometric evaluation of the humanities and social sciences. The respondents found the coverage in the citation databases to be lower for these fields, compared with others. Still, it remained the best available indicator. Furthermore, three of seven universities allocated no funds based on bibliometric analyses. The librarians and bibliometricians in the study mentioned the following competencies as important with regard to working with bibliometrics: insight into research and publication practises, knowledge about databases and systems, analytic thinking and ability to understand contexts as well as to handle different bibliometric indicators. Future perspectives for bibliometrics include the use of the new Swedish list, development of altmetrics as well as investment in open access and increasing digitalization of the society.

In today’s society, everyone should have the opportunity to study at university. To support this the Swedish government wants all universities to work with broadened participation. The term broadened participation was founded during the Bologna process to make sure the student populations at our universities represent the population in society at large. An important part of students' ability to complete their education is the university's library. In this study, I research what the Swedish universities offer in terms of help for students with neuropsychiatric disability. During interviews with representatives of the libraries at our largest universities, I aimed to discover what is being done to help these students and question what can be done by the libraries to improve the chances of success for neuropsychiatrically disabled students. The results from this study show certain similarities between how the universities worked, especially in regard to the use of speech synthesis and Legimus. Most university librarians felt they lacked the ability and knowledge to change the environment to be a better fit for their disabled students, and many craved a stronger interest from the people in charge.

When circumstances for university libraries changed drastically due to the covid-19 pandemic in 2020, video mediated reference service was used to maintain availability for library users. Many libraries used Zoom for this service. This thesis aims to investigate librarians' reference work via video calls, through a case study of a university library in Sweden. The study gathers librarians' experiences of communicating with users via Zoom, to gain knowledge about the work's characteristics and to discover possible strategies for managing video call services, and their inherent strengths and weaknesses, in a university library context. The study is based on six semi-structured interviews with university librarians who work at the Zoom desk. All respondents have many years of experience of working at a traditional reference desk, which enables valuable comparisons between the two working methods. The results reveal several advantages of Zoom, one of the biggest being the separate and undisturbed space that the Zoom desk represents. As a result of that, the respondents point out that Zoom has come to be used for in-depth reference service. By analyzing the interviews through the sociologist Erving Goffman’s theoretical framework of social interaction, and theories of social presence, we also hope to increase the understanding of the dynamics in video mediated communication.

This thesis concerns the subject of videos in libraries, with a special focus on university libraries. The problem statement concerns that videos as a library resource have been far less studied than books. Also, videos in university libraries have been less studied than in public libraries. There is also a need for further investigation of how libraries define the concept of quality, and how this issue affects their acquisition decisions. The purpose of the thesis s to investigate how university libraries prioritize in their selection of videos. Three research questions are posed. The first question relates to aspects of quality. The second question concerns the aspects of education and entertainment. The third question concerns the view of physical and digital formats of videos. The main source of theory is Johannsen (1996), who discusses five certain views of quality. The main method used is semi-structured interviews, conducted at two Swedish universities: Lund University and Malmö University. The selected libraries all had (mostly physical) videos in their collections, according to the universities’ library catalogues. The results show that various factors, both subjective and objective, affect university libraries’ selection of videos. Overall, it seems clear that no single rule or definition of quality is enough. One main conclusion is that the quality of a video never can be judged entirely objectively. Libraries will have to make a judgement call, or leave this judgment at least partly to their users.

Library management systems (LMS) are a big part of the workday for most librarians. Everything from acquisitions, managing e-resources and circulation work is done through these kinds of systems. Umeå university library implemented a new LMS called Alma back in 2018. They moved from a local system to a more complex and advanced cloud-based system. This study has examined how the system has been received through the lens of the Unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT). A survey containing 23 Likert items were answered by librarians at Umeå university’s libraries. The items were grouped under four overhead categories collected from UTAUT: performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence and facilitating conditions. Afterwards an analysis was made that examined whether age, gender, experience with the system and most used task in Alma had any influence over certain categories. The study shows that age and gender did not influence performance expectancy, but the most common task did with circulation work as an outlier with more negative scoring. Gender did not influence effort expectancy either, but age did where younger people tended to score lower and the age group 42–49 handing out higher scores. The most used task also influenced this factor but experience with the system did not influence the factor in a major way. Facilitating conditions was influenced by age where the age group in the middle once again scored much higher than the youngest group. Experience with Alma also influenced this factor in the sense that less experienced workers scored lower. Most used task in Alma followed the same pattern as the other factors with circulation tasks scoring lower and administration tasks scoring higher. Social influence did not pass the Cronbach’s alpha that was set at 0.7 and showed overall internal low correlation, therefore it was not included in the analysis.

<p>Syftet med denna uppsats var att kartlägga de projekt för elektronisk publicering, där forskningsbiblioteken är inblandade. Detta genomfördes genom en studie över vad det är som styr utvecklingen av alternativa publiceringssystem. Det var både svenska och utländska projekt som undersöktes, fast tonvikten lades på situationen i Sverige och det nystartade DiVA-projektet. DiVA-projektet är ett projekt som bygger upp ett gemensamt biblioteksarkiv för vetenskapliga dokument, där man inledningsvis e-publicerar avhandlingar. Forskningsbiblioteken antar i dessa projekt en ny roll, den som förläggare av lärosätenas vetenskapliga information. Undersökningen gjordes dels genom en analys av artiklar, debatter o.d. om DiVA-projektet, dels genom en kvalitativ intervju med den ansvarige för DiVA-projektet vid Umeå universitet och dels genom en analys av artiklar, debatter o.d. om andra projekt för elektronisk publicering. Resultatet visade att det är forskarnas värderingar samt organisatoriska, tekniska och ekonomiska styrmedel, som är tänkbara orsaker till initieringen av projekten och utvecklingen av alternativa publiceringssystem. Forskarsamhällets värderingar för en fullgod vetenskaplig kommunikation, definierade av Robert K. Merton, säger att forskaren utan baktankar ska sprida sina dokument och få dem kritiskt granskade. Forskarsamhället i stort menar emellertid att de alternativa publiceringssystemen som finns brister i beständighet, tillgänglighet och tillförlitlighet. Därför fungerar inte den vetenskapliga kommunikationen som den ska. Detta tvingar mer eller mindre fram utvecklingen av alternativa publiceringssystem och forskningsbiblioteken måste ta sitt ansvar för att bidra till en lösning på problemen. Internet underlättar utvecklingen, i och med att informationssamhället mer och mer utvecklas till ett nätverkssamhälle, något som Manuel Castells poängterar. Nätverksorganisationer kan enligt Castells skapas, som tillsammans kan utveckla mer tekniskt utvecklade alternativa publiceringssystem och på samma gång sänka kostnaderna för spridningen och bevarandet av vetenskaplig information. Av de fyra drivkrafterna bakom utvecklingen av alternativa publiceringssystem verkar den ekonomiska drivkraften vara den allra starkaste ur forskningsbibliotekens synvinkel, eftersom dessa har mycket att vinna ekonomiskt genom denna utveckling och är därför mycket aktiva i utvecklingsarbetet.</p>