Search results

Mountbatten offers a vivid description of the current‐awareness function using the analogy of a very wide conveyor‐belt, representing the information publishers, on which books, periodicals and reports appear at random: ‘The searcher is on a platform just above the belt and as the information material passes underneath he can pick up and read anything that he thinks might be of interest to him. You can imagine his frustration as he realises that for every item he takes time to examine, hundreds of others of possible interest to him have passed by’. Personality and environment will determine whether the individual can find an intelligent compromise between the extremes of neurosis induced by worrying about the material he is missing, or complacency with any system which produces one or two interesting items.

Due to increasing interest in school development planning, improvement and effectiveness, more schools are gaining greater control over their own school management. Argues that school development plans should provide an operational structure with a clearly identified direction and priorities. Focuses on the problem of planning within the international school context and investigates specific objectives via a survey. Results confirmed that long‐term planning is valued by heads of international schools and that staff development is integral to planning and implementing strategies.

Information retrieval is a sequence of selection and discrimination steps, aimed at the production of progressively smaller subsets. A great multitude of documents are prepared for publication by aspiring authors and though editorial control produces some weeding‐out, a high proportion are probably published in one form or another. From this published literature are selected those items to be included in the large indexing and abstracting journals, on the grounds of either quality or subject matter. These publications are then searched by human scanner or computer to select the small minority of bibliographic records which may be of interest to the ultimate user. Then it is the user's turn. He selects from the bibliographic listing a yet smaller number of documents he wishes to view and, finally and occasionally, in a few of the documents he reads, he finds useful information: a datum, an experimental method, the barely discerned inkling of an idea.

Downloading and uploading offer labour‐saving advantages and are now accepted as useful options in online searching. All aspects are here considered, from recent technical advances, applications and legal attitudes. There is also a review of current software for downloading. Recent developments mean a trend to higher internal memory and storage capacity, and greater transmission speeds. Packages now offer access to more than one host, give maximum assistance to the user without being menu‐driven and incorporate the latest developments in artificial intelligence. Disadvantages are in the length of time involved in the process and the fact that the legal issue of copyright has not yet been finalised. Database producers have turned to licensing under contract law, but there is still need to rely on user ethics, and the need for a standard permissions form is highlighted.

The developments in the use of computer systems in libraries from 1966 to date have been great. This report, written to coincide with the twenty‐first anniversary of the publication of Program, looks at some of these developments, in Britain, in North America, and in other countries. It traces the history of library automation from the early experimental systems through to the co‐operative systems, the locally developed systems, the mini‐ and microcomputer‐based and stand‐alone integrated systems that are available today.

This study aims to critically review and analyse the classification of supply chain risks and disruptions and thereby suggest a suitable method for classifying maritime risks. It aims to discuss the propagation effects of port disruption on the supply chain and mitigation strategies.

In addition to secondary research, six semi-structured interviews were conducted with the management personnel of two terminal operators, two shipping lines and two insurance companies.

When a port disruption happens, the most immediate impact is the adverse effects on terminal operations. It also leads to a domino effect on other parties in the supply chain including shippers and consignees, shipping companies, inter-modal transport providers and other ports. Proper risk management needs to be embraced by the supply chain members. However, there is very little or no such collaboration between the supply chain members in practice.

This article proposes a more integrative approach in assessing various kinds of risks, and more research in this area to be done for Asia.

Risk management has been the concern for many stakeholders ranging from industry practitioners to the people who are affected by the maritime business throughout the world. The maritime industry should look into risk management in the maritime logistics and supply chain context instead of dealing with risk in isolation.

There is a serious lack of research for analysing supply chain disruptions with ports as a focal point. The paper contributes by filling the research gap.

VINE is produced at least four times a year with the object of providing up‐to‐date news of work being done in the automation of library housekeeping processes, principally in the UK. It is edited and substantially written by the Information Officer for ctdirary Automation bused in Southampton University Library and supported by a grant from the British Library Research and Development Department. Copyright for VINE articles rests with the British Library‐Boards but Opinions expressed in VINE do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the British Library. The subscription for 1983 for VINE is £22 for UK subscribers and £25 for overseas subscribers. The first copy will be charged at normal rate, but all others will be supplied for only £12 per year UK and £14 per year overseas. VINE is available in either paper copy or microfiche and all back issues are available on microfiche.

This review aims to present a speciality to the general documentationalist. It will contain too little chemistry for the chemist, and too little documentation for the documentalist. A reviewer cannot win!

My originalthis paper was to take, from the literature, examples of successful solutions of practical problems found in using external information services. This would have been fine if there had been any examples in the literature, but there were none that I found. No one has said in print what happens when tapes are held up for three months in a dock strike, or how much it costs to re‐profile when the thesaurus is revised without consultation with the user, or how much extra work is involved when the record format is changed at short notice. No one has actually stated in public that he allowed two hours per profile and it actually required ten, or that the programming costs were three times as large as his (and his Computer Department Manager's) estimate. These things happen—but one naturally does not admit to them in print, even though by so doing one could be of inestimable value to one's professional colleagues.

Thirty years or more ago, a favoured question in examination papers for librarians was some variation on the theme ‘Compare the merits of a classified catalogue and an alphabetical subject catalogue’. This was a subject which it was possible to write on or to discuss at great length, advancing a number of theoretical arguments or opinions expressed by pundits, without ever stating a single demonstrable fact. When, in the early 1950's, various people, such as Taube and Mooers, proposed new techniques for indexing, the reaction from the traditionally‐minded was such that it appeared there was to be a repetition of all the old arguments. In an editorial in American Documentation in 1955, Perry expressed a viewpoint, shared by many others, when he wrote: