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Scheduling conflicts and budget deficits forced the termination of a classroom‐format training program for student assistants serving at a university library general reference desk. In its place has arisen a year‐round alternative approach to training that combines individualized instruction, hands‐on learning, scavenger hunts, and regular review of reference desk policies, practices, and procedures. This reincarnated undergraduate student assistant training program now allows for ongoing practice and increased feedback. Additional benefits of this new training program include greater student‐student and student‐staff interactions, the flexibility to quickly address perceived problems, and the ability to rapidly focus on new reference tools and reference policies.

The utility and viability of print vertical files often has been questioned in the literature. Recently, alternatives or supplements to the print vertical file have been proposed and implemented in the form of an electronic or World Wide Web vertical file. The use and maintenance of a print vertical file and the newly created World Wide Web version of this vertical file were studied during the 1997 summer and fall semesters at the University of Northern Iowa. As Neuhaus shows in this article, results indicate that a WWW vertical file is both more popular and easier to maintain than a traditional print vertical file.

Describes how the reference service provided by the Rod Library Information File has recently been enhanced by the creation of a World Wide Web extension of this vertical file. Like the Information File, the WWW Info File provides Rod Library patrons with subject access to Iowa, corporate, and general information. States that benefits and pitfalls of developing and maintaining this additional system are many and argues that though a final verdict on this system has yet to be pronounced, this and other efforts at vertical file automation may herald renewed interest in this backwater of library and information research.

The Vertical File Index, Consumer Information Catalog, and Information America are rich sources of free and inexpensive information. An analysis of the average price per item and a determination of the percentage of free materials offered by these three resources were performed on samples spaced at five‐year intervals over the past 40 years. The prices of inexpensive materials and the percentage of free material available from these titles have remained nearly stable over the past 40 years. This is especially true if inflation and the relative buying power of the 1997 dollar are factored in. These three sources have provided, and continue to provide, a consistent supply of free and inexpensive materials for vertical file collections on a tight budget.

In 1999 a library marketing committee was created on the University of Northern Iowa campus. The aim of this committee was to heighten administrator, faculty and student awareness of library resources and services. This marketing committee was charged with helping administrators, faculty, and students realise what we librarians already know – that the library is capable of galvanising, nurturing, and supporting the research of the university community. During 2000 and 2001 various marketing efforts and experiments were employed by this committee including: promotional newsletters and e‐mail postings, student surveys, co‐operative marketing studies conducted with marketing students, participation in student and faculty orientations and creative advertising via library pens, library shirts, online library newsletters and sidewalk slogans. While results from this ongoing experiment are encouraging, committee members discovered that significant time, effort and money can be expended in marketing a library.

Previous research on the relationship between service environments and customer emotions and service outcomes has focused on the physical environment. Among studies exploring the social environment, the emphasis has been on service employees, ignoring the impact of other customers. Recent research has further called for the need to include displayed emotion within the social environment. Therefore, this study aims to develop and test a more comprehensive model that focuses on the relationship between the social environment (employee displayed emotion and customer climate) and the physical environment (ambient and design factors) and resulting customer emotion and service outcomes.

Based on past research, a theoretical framework was developed to propose the links between social/physical environments and customer emotion/perceptions. Extant research from various academic fields, including environmental psychology, was reviewed, deriving 11 hypotheses. Data collected from fashion apparel retailers, using both observation and customer survey methods, was examined through structural equation modeling (SEM).

Results show that both social and physical environments have a positive influence on customer emotion and satisfaction, which in turn affect behavioral intentions. The physical environment exhibited more influence on customer emotion and satisfaction than social environment.

This research explains how both social and physical environments affect customer emotion and perceptions. Future research directions are discussed, with an emphasis on incorporating customer characteristics, industry attributes, and cultural variables to better understand the influence of service environments in different service settings.

Social and physical environments influence customer emotional states within the service delivery context, which in turn affect customer service evaluations. Therefore, both social and physical service environments should be emphasized by service firms.

This research represents an early attempt to develop a more comprehensive model explaining how both social and physical environments affect customer emotion and perceptions. This study also represents the first empirical study of service environment research to include employee displayed emotion as part of the social environment.

This paper examines the clustering of return volatility within industries by comparing the short‐run responses of stock returns to the arrival of macroeconomic news across several industries. We hypothesize that some industries have distinctive qualities which influence the sensitivity of companies’ equity value to information releases. To test this hypothesis, we sample intraday stock price data of ten firms from three industries ‐ General Industry, Banking, and Real Estate Trusts ‐ and conduct the Brown‐Forsythe‐Modified Levene tests. The evidence shows that there exist different degrees of responses to the release of macroeconomic news and consequently different degrees of return volatility clustering: strongest in General Industry, less strong in Banking, and weak in Real Estate Investment Trusts.