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The purpose of this paper is to review the literature of digital libraries (DLs), explore some issues and indicate some considerations. The paper also demonstrates the current situation and orientation of research topics and priorities in DLs.

Keywords such as “DL research”, “DL evaluation”, “DL management”, “DLs”, “DL studies” and so on were searched for on the web as well as in some leading databases, including Emerald, Proquest, SagePub, ScienceDirect and Springer. The search focused on three main categories in relation to DL literature: evaluation or performance appraisal, management, and education.

The review demonstrates that a lot has been learned in a short time via DL studies. However, a number of issues are yet to be resolved. In other words, research in the arena of DLs is still growing and it is predicted that new horizons will emerge, along with a variety of issues.

The review does not claim to be comprehensive.

It is hoped that matters such as legal issues, social issues, standards, metadata, management of intellectual and digital rights and interoperability, not included here, will be discussed in future works.

The paper can serve as a road‐map of digital library research for researchers, designers and users.

Within the retail banking sector, the customer-centric business model has become an important and new business trend in recent years. The enhancement of the frontline service employees’ engagement and their customer-oriented behaviors are among the key factors affecting business performance (BP) in this sector of the banking industry. The purpose of this paper is to improve management decisions to enhance BP through examining the relationship between the frontline employees’ engagement and BP while taking into account the mediating effect of customer-oriented behaviors on this relationship.

A quantitative approach was adopted to conduct the present study, and the respondents were sampled from a large commercial bank in Iran using a structured questionnaire. Overall, 50 branch managers and 90 frontline employees were selected using random sampling. A confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to ascertain the validity and reliability of the observed items and a structural equation model was used for testing the proposed hypotheses and research framework.

The findings showed that customer-oriented behaviors mediated the relationship between the frontline employees’ engagement and bank’s branches’ BP. Higher levels of the frontline employees’ engagement enhance the customer-oriented behaviors. It was revealed that the frontline employees are engaged in their job and organization. Moreover, the engaged frontline employees listen carefully to customers, the customer’s problem is important to them and they complete their tasks precisely for customers. It has been confirmed that customer-oriented behaviors enhance branches’ BP. The bank frontline employees’ engagement and customer-oriented behaviors, in turn, affected the bank’s branches’ financial performance, process performance and employee performance compared with the bank’s key competitors.

This study highlights the value of empirically establishing how employee customer-oriented behaviors are affected by employee engagement as an integrative construct bringing together BP.

This study can help improve BP by increasing the frontline employees’ engagement and their customer-oriented behaviors. This study suggests that organizations using the findings of this study could effectively assess their frontline employees’ engagement and their customer-oriented behaviors and then plan for improving them.

This study offers a customer-oriented initiative as a social responsibility to be considered by retail banks. In light of the social exchange theory, the banks valuing customer-oriented can provide employees with knowledge, skills, values and support to develop motivation and abilities to demonstrate customer-oriented organizational citizenship behaviors.

Previous studies demonstrated that the employees’ engagement affects their customer-oriented behaviors. In addition, studies have referred to the effect of employees’ customer-oriented behaviors on BP. However, to the best of the knowledge, key questions regarding how the employees’ engagement at the branch level fosters customer-oriented behaviors and, in turn, the bank’s branches’ BP, remain unanswered. Hence, this study contributes to the investigation of the mediating role of the frontline employees’ customer-oriented behaviors in the relationship between their engagement and branches’ BP in the retail banking sector.

The paper investigates the effects of strategic human resource practices on intellectual capital and new product development performance in knowledge-based firms.

A quantitative approach was adopted to conduct the present study. The respondents were sampled from knowledge-based firms in Iran. Overall, 120 managers in 60 knowledge-based firms were selected using convenience sampling. A confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to ascertain the validity and reliability of the observed items, and a structural equation model was employed for testing the proposed hypotheses.

In the studied firms, strategic human resource practices have a positive and significant effect on intellectual capital. Moreover, the findings of this study indicate that those firms that use their intellectual capital have a higher new product development performance.

The study focuses on knowledge-based firms in Iran, which limits the generalizability of the research results. Therefore, future studies should be carried out with samples from other settings and countries. Moreover, as the study was cross-sectional, the causal relationships could not be inferred directly.

With regard to key areas of improvement identified in this study, knowledge-based firms should focus on increasing new product development performance by improving employees' training, involving them in their job-related decision-making process, empowering employees to innovate, developing intellectual capital and monitoring the customer's satisfaction level of new products.

The study extends the intellectual capital literature by linking strategic human resource practices to new product development performance in knowledge-based firms via intellectual capital as a mediator.