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This paper presents a model of government saving in order to examine several questions regarding the personal and professional saving preferences or inclinations of a national sample of local government finance managers. First, is personal propensity to save related to a preference for local government saving? Second, is personal propensity to spend related to the finance managers' opinions about their local government's spending? Third, what are the determinants of finance managers' propensity to save or spend, both personally and for their local government? Results confirm that finance managers have a personal propensity to save and a positive view toward local government saving. The opposite, propensity to spend, is also influenced by personal preference. Determinants of these behaviors are explored.

In recent years, aceted search has been a well-accepted approach for many academic libraries across the United States. This chapter is based on the author’s dissertation and work of many years on faceted library catalogs. Not to hope to be exhaustive, the author’s aim is to provide sufficient depth and breadth to offer a useful resource to researchers, librarians, and practitioners about faceted search used in library catalogs.

The chapter reviews different aspects of faceted search used in academic libraries, from the theory, the history, to the implementation. It starts with the history of online public access catalogs (OPACs) and how people search with OPACs. Then it introduces the classic facet theory and its relationship with faceted search. At last, various academic research projects on faceted search, especially faceted library catalogs, are briefly reviewed. These projects include both implementation studies and the evaluation studies.

The results indicate that most searchers were able to understand the concept of facets naturally and easily. Compared to text searches, however, faceted searches were complementary and supplemental, and used only by a small group of searchers.

The author hopes that the facet feature has not only been cosmetic but the answer to the call for the next generation catalog for academic libraries. The results of this research are intended to inform librarians and library information technology (IT) staff to improve the effectiveness of the catalogs to help people find information they need more efficiently.

This paper analyzes the impact of economic downturns on the revenue and expense sides of city financing for the period 2003 to 2009 using a convenience sample of the audited end of year financial reports for thirty midsized US cities. The analysis focuses on whether and how quickly and how extensively revenue and spending directions from past years are altered by recessions. A seven year series of Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) data serves to explore whether citiesʼ revenues and spending, especially the traditional property tax and core functions such as public safety and infrastructure withstood the brief 2001 and the persistent 2007 recessions? The findings point to consumption (spending) over stability (revenue minus expense) for the recession of 2007, particularly in 2008 and 2009.

Considers relevance of AACR to on‐line library catalogues. Surveys the history of cataloguing rules in relation to the code′s relevance in the state of librarianship at the time. Stresses the need for a code taking account of the actual and potential benefit of computerized catalogues and discusses various relevant aspects.

Identification in a regression discontinuity (RD) design hinges on the discontinuity in the probability of treatment when a covariate (assignment variable) exceeds a known threshold. If the assignment variable is measured with error, however, the discontinuity in the relationship between the probability of treatment and the observed mismeasured assignment variable may disappear. Therefore, the presence of measurement error in the assignment variable poses a challenge to treatment effect identification. This chapter provides sufficient conditions to identify the RD treatment effect using the mismeasured assignment variable, the treatment status and the outcome variable. We prove identification separately for discrete and continuous assignment variables and study the properties of various estimation procedures. We illustrate the proposed methods in an empirical application, where we estimate Medicaid takeup and its crowdout effect on private health insurance coverage.

The purpose of this research is to examine fiscal health of a specific local enterprise operation: seaports. Seaports provide unique local services while spending and borrowing billions of dollars. Decision makers should be aware of the fiscal health of these enterprises in part to assess the potential risks to the fiscal health of the government at large or public authority. Using eight stock and flow fiscal indicators appropriate for enterprise activities, this research examines eight seaports to compare fiscal health by geographic location and governing structure as well as the connection between long-term and short-term fiscal measures. Descriptive measures suggest that western and public authority ports exhibit better fiscal health than southern and departmental ports with some evidence showing a modest link between long-term and short-term fiscal health.

The purpose of this paper is to show that the approaches to smart specialisation being adopted in different European Union (EU) regions are likely to be heavily shaped by the institutional and governance context, as well as the regional economic specifics. Along with the specific regional economic characteristics, these institutional variations mean that there is no single smart specialisation template or blueprint which can be transplanted onto every region. Rather, regions have to work within their own governance frameworks to find their best solutions.

As evidence of this, the authors analyse the possibilities and challenges faced by four different sets of regional examples in the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain. Using OECD, EU and other official national documents and publications, the authors are able to explain the ways in which the governance set-ups vary enormously across these different arenas although they do share some certain common features with the other examples on a case-by-case basis.

The policy architecture within which the smart specialisation agenda will be operating is very different in each national or regional case. As such, in addition to the regional economic specifics, the smart specialisation challenges faced by different regions are likely to differ significantly due to governance issues as well as variations in the regional economic conditions. This is because the possibilities for different regional actions depend heavily on the governance relationship between the regional and the local governance remits.

The argument presented here are necessarily in part speculative in that while they are based on a regional systems-of-innovation conceptual framework which links institutions, innovation and regional development, the actual smart specialisation implementation processes are still in their infancy, so that the actual outcomes remain to be seen in the long run.

The analysis here helps to situate smart specialisation discussions in the national-regional institutional and governance context. This also serves to frame how smart specialisation priority-setting processes are likely to be undertaken and helps to consider how such activities may play out in other regions with different institutional settings.

This is one of the few papers that explicitly examine specialisation issues in a governance and institutional setting. In reality, the success or otherwise of smart specialisation agenda will be heavily shaped by how the governance and institutional issues are addressed. Good analysis and data gathering is essential, but good governance for policy design, monitoring and evaluation can potentially also provide a crucial advantage to smart specialisation actions. In contrast, poor governance may undermine good smart specialisation intentions and analyses.

Advancements in technology have led to many changes in the field of Library and Information Science (LIS). As global communications and technology continue to become more available and sophisticated, LIS programs need to prepare students for employment in rapidly changing and globalized LIS professions.

Data from a total of 63 programs from the American Library Association (ALA) and 32 programs from the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) was collected through openly accessible websites of these programs. Areas explored include program name, name and level of the academic unit offering the program, credit hours, required courses, percentage of required courses and capstone measurements used within the different LIS programs.

A majority of programs still preserve the keyword “Library” in their name, but not the academic units offering them. Most programs in ALA and CILIP follow a semester-based program. Research methods, internships, practical experience, combined with traditional library core and information technology requirements were found to constitute the major subjects in general. Comprehensive exams were replaced by e-portfolios among ALA programs while a dissertation remains the preferred choice of capstone requirement for CILIP.

Scant studies compare accredited LIS programs worldwide, motivating the study of the similarities, differences and trends of LIS programs under the current globalized technology-driven knowledge economy. This paper seeks to fill the literature gap and promote a global discussion and understanding of LIS curricula in different regions of the world, guiding potential students to select their suitable LIS programs.