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England has a great variety of historic buildings and monuments, often set in fine surroundings. They are our architectural heritage: a growing heritage. Of 5,500 or more buildings of special merit, at least 1,500 are open to the public. They are owned by the nation, by local authorities or non‐profit making trusts, and mostly by private individuals or families. They are spread throughout England, offering many interesting things besides the architecture itself.

To succeed in the rapidly evolving experience economy executives must think differently about how they create economic value for their customers.

Five value-creating opportunities are likely to drive further progress in the dynamic experience economy: customizing goods; enhancing services; charging for experiences; fusing digital technology with reality; and transformative experiences, a promising frontier.

For leaders, five insights about the value-creating opportunities are key to achieving success via state-of-the-art experience staging, and they provide tested guidelines for managing in the experience economy, now and into the future.

A huge first step in staging more engaging experiences is embracing the principle that work is theatre. So businesses should ask: What acts of theatre would turn our workers' functional activities into memorable events?

Three key lessons: innovation to create high-quality experiences that customers will pay for is even more important than goods or service innovation. When you customize an experience, you automatically turn it into a transformation. Companies enabling transformations should charge not merely for time but for the change resulting from that time.

WE look before and after at the beginning of 1951. The three cardinal dates in the history of the public library movement—which is only the larger part of the national library service—were 1850 which saw the legal origin of the movement; 1919 when it was set free from the enforced poverty of sixty‐nine years, and 1950 when it reached what until today was its veritable apotheosis. General recognition, such as authority from the Crown to the humblest journal gave to public libraries, was something undreamed of not more than thirty years ago. Perhaps, now that some of the splendour of the commemoration has taken more sober colours, it is well to consider what was gained by it. First, the recognition is there and can scarcely be belittled by anyone hereafter; we stand on a somewhat different platform now. We have the extremely valued recognition of our colleagues from libraries overseas. From these advantages all libraries and not only public libraries will in their own way profit.

Since our last observations on this topic, several articles have appeared in different newspapers commenting upon our arguments and proposals. Several writers seem to hold unnecessarily strong views, and are assiduous in bringing forward the old argument that local option in the matter of rating will defeat the movement in favour of the adoption of the Acts by the ratepayers in many districts, but especially in London. It is well known to every student of the public library movement, that nothing has retarded its progress so much as the compulsory public plébiscite of citizens. Whether this was accomplished by means of public meetings or voting papers, the result was invariably the same, only a very small proportion of voters took the trouble to vote. We cannot see, therefore, that any particular consideration is due to their views on the subject, and especially in London, with such lamentable examples of utter lack of public spirit as have been presented, time after time, by places like Paddington, Marylebone, Islington, and St. Pancras. The most of this argument as regards London, the sole remaining stronghold of the plebiscite where large and populous areas are concerned, is very much nullified by the fact that a Bill has been prepared by the Library Association, and will probably be introduced by Lord Windsor, in which the power of adopting the Acts is transferred to the Local Authority. We cannot regard seriously the argument that local option in rating will hinder further progress, since it is perfectly notorious to everyone that it is nothing but the Parliamentary limitation on the amount of the Library Rate which stifles every movement designed to strengthen, extend, and popularize our Public Libraries. In our next issue we hope to be able to print a tabular view of the progress of the Library movement, which will prove pretty conclusively the increased rate of growth since the power of adoption was given to the Local Authorities. Meanwhile we publish another contribution on the general question by a well‐known and capable librarian of much experience.

This paper presents the results of a choice experiment carried out from August to October 2000 on the visitors of the Galleria Borghese Museum, a worldwide known heritage site located in Rome. The main objective of this work is to study the relevancy of choice experiment techniques as a tool aimed at measuring economic values and assessing user preferences concerning the multi‐attribute and multi‐value services as supplied by cultural institutions. A set of alternative incremental changes in service attributes showing improvements in supply are designed and presented to visitors. Alternative conditional logit specifications are used for analysing stated choices over the hypothetical incremental changes in museum attributes. Willingness to pay for incremental variations concerning site attributes is positive and statistically significant for most changes. Conditional logit specifications, which incorporate heterogeneity by adding interaction socio‐economic terms, are generally robust and do not violate the IIA assumption. In addition, in the present case study, non‐IIA models do not outperform conditional logit models. Choice experiments confirm as being a practical and effective tool for non‐market valuation, and they should be used to provide information to decision makers for justifying demand led policies.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a snapshot and a comparative analysis of copyright exceptions available for libraries. It frames the differences and similarities, leading to discussion as to what extent copyright exceptions help libraries cater the changing technology.

This paper introduces the role of copyright exceptions in balancing owners and users interests. It explains evolving libraries activities due to technological development and how copyright exceptions significantly applies. Several factors in Canadian and Malaysian statutes are compared, namely, the rights granted, purposes allowed, beneficiaries affected, works involved, and conditions attached. This signifies to what extent the library exceptions cater to the changing needs and circumstances. It emphasizes the importance of awareness and understanding in order for libraries to serve its role effectively.

Both countries consider the use of new technologies in its library exceptions. Malaysian statute adopts a general approach which can either be flexibly or rigidly interpreted. Comparatively, Canada adopts a more specific and detail approach that might restrict beneficial activities. This paper calls for extra effort for policy makers to allow more control of digital works that may serve libraries activities.

There has not been any comparative study in the library literature on copyright exceptions for libraries in Malaysia and Canada. This study aims to provoke such discussion and how each country may learn from each others practices. It should be useful to the whole library community, particularly to both countries.

This chapter analyses the interaction between two important movements in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century, the international contribution to urban planning through the New Towns programme and the particular contribution of British artists to public art and how these two parallel movements intertwine. The chapter begins by considering the definition of public art and the marked changes to the work purchased and commissioned in the immediate post-war period. The chapter then considers how the development of post-war New Towns has created new opportunities for contemporary artists, whose work had previously been confined to the gallery. In some cases the public art is integral to the architecture, and this opportunity has since become a threat to the future of many of these artworks. The optimism that defined post-war planning gave way to more negative perceptions of some New Towns as sites of boredom, monotony and even decay, from a failure to deliver on their initial promises of good jobs; a clean, modern environment; and supportive welfare state. In the second half of the chapter are examples of current public art activity in New Towns, and the challenges to sustain these in a time of public sector austerity. Finally, the chapter looks forward, and at the potential to sustain and reinvigorate public art in New Towns into the future.

Contends that information should be added to the six management functions enunciated by Henri Fayol in 1916. Considers some problems of information: the awareness problem; government neglect of the information function; inadequate indexing; poor administration in libraries; and information overload. Discusses the potential of information technology and pays attention to the difficulties experienced by developing countries.

This study focuses on ratcheting and budget behavior in nonprofit museums. Specifically, the authors examine how performance compared with the budget affects future revenue budgets, and how this differs from the extant literature focused on for-profit organizations. The study focuses specifically on the relationship between museums and their sources of public funding and how this affects how museums prepare budgets.

Based on four years of data covering 97 state-subsidized Danish museums, the authors analyze budget ratcheting using least absolute deviation (LAD) estimations in the form of median regressions.

The authors find that when actual revenue from admission charges is below the budget, the decrease in the following year's budget is greater than the increase in the following year's budget when actual revenue from admission charges is above the budget (i.e. the authors find asymmetrical ratcheting).

The findings are based on a specific setting (Danish museums), and the results may not be generalizable to other settings.

This study provides insights into the museum sector and other sectors with similar characteristics and contributes to understanding the differences between museums and for-profit organizations when it comes to budgeting. As private-sector management practices are gaining ground in the museum sector, it is important to learn more about budgeting-related issues in this sector.

The asymmetrical ratcheting the authors find is the opposite of ratcheting typically found in for-profit organizations. The authors attribute the results to the incentive conflict between museums and their public funding sources. The authors point to the museums' dependence on public funding as an explanation for the results and, thereby, extend the knowledge on ratcheting to organizations with different characteristics than traditional, for-profit organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to apply analysis of public discourses on Ze Xiao to explore and interpret the power relationships shaping inequality in admission to public junior high schools in urban China.

This study first introduces the rise of Ze Xiao as an educational phenomenon in China. It then elucidates power relationships in public school admission by analyzing continuities and changes in stakeholders’ interaction in public school admission. It concludes by discussing educational reform for equal public school admission in urban China. Data were collected from written and spoken texts about public school admission, including newspaper articles from the 1980s to the 2000s, policy documents and interviews with relevant stakeholders.

Findings demonstrate that multi-layered power relationships caused diverse inequalities in admission to public secondary education in urban China. These are represented by political and institutional privileges and an imbalance in education development during the social transition from a profit-driven approach in the 1990s to a balance-centered one after 2000. Arguably, there is a necessity to further promote a systematic reform to terminate the privileges and imbalance for an equal and balanced public secondary education in urban China post-2015.

This study attempts to make a contribution toward reconstructing the meaning of inequality in admission to public junior high schools in urban areas by revealing the power relationships among stakeholders constituted through their interactions in public education during the different stages of socio-economic development in urban China.