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This study examines the impact of participation in a STEM Enrichment Summer Bridge Program, funded by the NSF Houston-Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, on undergraduate student success outcomes, particularly for under-represented students.

The study uses propensity score matching and logistic regression analysis to examine the effects of participation in the STEM enrichment program on graduation and retention in STEM after matching on baseline socio-demographic and pre-college characteristics.

The analysis found that program participation had a significant effect on increasing both the graduation rates and retention of under-represented minority students in STEM fields. In addition, results indicated that program participation had a particularly strong impact for Pell-eligible students in terms of course grades.

Data obtained for this study were limited to a single Hispanic-serving/Asian-serving institution, and therefore are not necessarily representative of the graduation and retention trends of the larger population of underrepresented minority (URM) students across the nation.

This study uniquely adds to the existing body of literature surrounding the retention of URM students in STEM fields by accounting for baseline variables, such as pre-college academic achievement and socio-demographic characteristics, that could lead to bias in estimating results. Specifically, this study addresses limitations of previous studies by comparing participants and non-participants of the STEM enrichment program who are matched on a selection of baseline characteristics.

The Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI) undertook an in‐depth analysis of its current serial subscriptions to determine whether they were meeting the needs of internal clients at the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and document delivery clients. The assumptions were that extended gaps existed in business literature needed by NRC clients and medical literature needed by document delivery clients. Seeks to address this issue.

The analysis was done from two perspectives: review and analysis of usage of the print serials subscriptions; and analysis of unfilled document delivery orders. The project team matched current serial titles with document delivery usage and then classified the titles by subject. Second, the team used data from unfilled orders to create a ranked list of titles not held at CISTI but for which clients were requesting articles. The ranked titles were validated by data from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) on titles requested by Canadian libraries and not widely available in Canada.

NRC users showed a need for more business titles and all client groups showed a marked need for medical titles. While 36 percent of titles in the collection were medical, they accounted for 57.2 percent of document delivery activity and for 64.6 percent of unfilled orders. As a result, CISTI purchased 135 new medical serial subscriptions and will update its collection development policy to allow for a broader collection in medicine and business.

The study shows that document delivery usage data can play a key role in supporting strategic collection decisions.

This paper seeks to describe a pilot project for the Federal Science eLibrary to measure the impacts on Government of Canada researchers when provided with seamless, equitable access to an expanded core of electronic journals in science, technology and medicine (STM). The Federal Science eLibrary is an initiative supported by the Strategic Alliance of Federal Science and Technology Libraries to provide improved access to information at the desktop for the 22,000 Canadian federal scientists, policy analysts and decision makers. The pilot project was designed to evaluate the benefits of increased access to e‐journals at the pilot sites and test network performance in connecting to a central digital repository.

A total of 500 users in three Canadian government sites with limited access to electronic resources were provided with full text access to a digital repository of over 3,000 e‐journals over a 12‐week period. Questionnaires, teleconferences, usage statistics and e‐mail correspondence were used to gather and measure researchers' response and show impacts on their ability to do their work.

Pilot groups reported significantly reduced time finding and verifying information. Time saved was redirected into critical activities such as research, laboratory activities, manuscript preparation, peer review activities and professional reading. Participants found that increased desktop access had a very positive impact on their ability to do their work.

This study shows the benefits of expanded access to electronic journals for federal government scientists through a Federal Science eLibrary initiative.

This case introduces offers the concept of cash-to-cash (C2C) and extension of the concept to facilitate supply chain finance improvements between trading partners by harvesting the inherent advantages (lower WACC, lower ICC) of one trading partner to reduce cost and benefit the entire supply chain.

The purpose of this paper is to critically review the core findings from recently published place‐based crime prevention research. The paper aims to critically evaluate the available evidence on the contribution of crime prevention through environmental design as a crime prevention strategy.

Large‐scale evaluations of crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) are reviewed with a view to clarifying current knowledge on the evidence of crime prevention through environmental design.

The review concludes that there is a growing body of research that supports the assertion that crime prevention through environmental design is effective in reducing both crime and fear of crime in the community.

Although the paper may not review all the evaluations of CPTED, it nonetheless provides a detailed compilation and overview of the most significant research in the area, including an extensive and modern bibliography on the subject. Research implications will be the subject of a forthcoming paper.

CPTED is an increasingly fashionable approach and is being implemented on a global scale. Additionally, individual components such as territoriality, surveillance, maintenance, access control, activity support and target‐hardening are being widely deployed. However, the evidence currently available is inconclusive and much criticised, which effectively prevents widespread intervention and investment by central government. The paper details the difficulties associated with demonstrating the effectiveness of CPTED.

The paper concludes that although empirical proof has not been definitively demonstrated, there is a large and growing body of research, which supports the assertion that crime prevention through environmental design is a pragmatic and effective crime prevention tool. This review provides an extensive bibliography of contemporary crime prevention through environmental design and a follow‐up paper will discuss the future research priorities for it.

Much research on information technology (IT) emphasizes the rational aspects of IT use. However, cultural analyses have considered IT as a symbolic artifact open to social interpretation. This article presents findings from ethnographic studies of two large insurance organizations to illustrate how cultural assumptions about IT are implicated in IT management. We employ the metaphor of magic as an interpretive lens to generate five archetypes of IT culture: the revered, controlled, demystified, integrated, and fearful IT cultures. Each of these archetypal cultural patterns reflects different assumptions about the “magic” of IT and the “wizards” who control its powers. These patterns are similar to social responses to the unknown that have been found in human cultures for hundreds of years. The metaphor itself was drawn from the language of the two organizations. All five archetypes were manifest in both of the companies studied, suggesting that organizations do not necessarily develop unified symbolic meanings of IT. Although separately each archetype invites novel insights into the management of IT in organizations, together they reveal even deeper interpretations consistent with contemporary theories of cultural differentiation and fragmentation.

This paper shows that the current quality literature does not consider all factors that affect quality program implementations. Employee perceptions of quality differ across organizational levels. It is clear that these differing perceptions of quality affect the success of a quality program implementation. Therefore, we propose the use of Q methodology as an effective method for understanding the perceptions of those individuals who will be taking part in a quality program implementation as well as for identifying supplemental training needs. In addition, we give an actual example of how this method can be used in a quality program implementation. This research is important because it shows the need for pre‐implementation assessment within the company and a generalizable tool that readily accomplishes this task.