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The history of the lending operations at Boston Spa may perhaps be best summed up by such statements as ‘from nothing to a million requests in fifteen years’. With the retirement in June this year of Donald Urquhart, the Library's chief planner, Director and the driving force behind its unique success story, it is perhaps opportune to look back at some of the milestones in its development.

The development of the BLLD is briefly described and the desire to set up similar institutions in the USA is discussed. The concept of a single national collection providing both reference and lending services is examined and apparent conflict of interests between visitors and remote borrowers is outlined in the light of the author's visits to Iran and Australia. The questions considered include simplified document retrieval, photocopy facilities and a fast service to remote borrowers on the one hand and the need for some duplication and a browsing capability on the other. It is generally concluded that remote borrowers must be properly serviced since they will form the majority of users.

During 1973 the British Library came into being when the National Central Library (NCL) and the National Lending Library (NLL) merged to form the Lending Division of the British Library, the BLL. This is a report on developments at Boston Spa during the period January 1973 to March 1974.

I AM BECOMING used to the modern convention which graces any hotchpotch of arrangements with the term ‘system’. Nevertheless I was surprised to find (NLW p53) Abraham Silence wondering how ‘the old system might have operated had it received an injection of the millions of pounds which have been spent at Boston Spa’.

The BLLD is able to satisfy a growing percentage of requests for material in the humanities. Its retrospective collections and current purchasing policy, which are described in some detail, enable it to supply half of the humanities monographs requested and two thirds of the serials from stock, with increasingly high success rates for more recent material. A further 30% of monograph requests and 15% of serial requests are satisfied from back‐up libraries (including the legal deposit libraries) and other sources.

The purpose of this paper is to study the existence of psychological barriers in cryptocurrencies.

To detect psychological barriers, the authors perform a uniformity test, a barrier hump test, a barrier proximity test and conditional effects test to a sample comprised by the daily closing quotes of six of the most liquid cryptocurrencies.

The results evidence the existence of psychological barriers in four of the cryptocurrencies under scrutiny, namely, Bitcoin, Dash, NEM and Ripple.

The fact that the cryptocurrency market has a high share of unexperienced investors and presents several cases of psychological barriers is consistent with the hypothesis that that class of investors is particularly prone to the behavioral biases which cause psychological barriers.

This paper studies, for the first time, the existence of psychological barriers in the market of cryptocurrencies.

This paper aims to investigate the effect of the economic policy uncertainty (EPU), geopolitical risk (GPR) and climate policy uncertainty (CPU) of USA on Bitcoin volatility from August 2010 to August 2022.

In this paper, the authors have adopted the empirical strategy of Yen and Cheng (2021), who modified volatility model of Wang and Yen (2019), and the authors use an OLS regression with Newey-West error term.

The results using OLS regression with Newey–West error term suggest that the cryptocurrency market could have hedge or safe-haven properties against EPU and geopolitical uncertainty. While the authors find that the CPU has a negative impact on the volatility of the bitcoin market. Hence, the authors expect climate and environmental changes, as well as indiscriminate energy consumption, to play a more important role in increasing Bitcoin price volatility, in the future.

This study has two implications. First, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the study is the first to extend the discussion on the effect of dimensions of uncertainty on the volatility of Bitcoin. Second, in contrast to previous studies, this study can be considered as the first to examine the role of climate change in predicting the volatility of bitcoin. This paper contributes to the literature on volatility forecasting of cryptocurrency in two ways. First, the authors discuss volatility forecasting of Bitcoin using the effects of three dimensions of uncertainty of USA (EPU, GPR and CPU). Second, based on the empirical results, the authors show that cryptocurrency can be a good hedging tool against EPU and GPR risk. But the cryptocurrency cannot be a hedging tool against CPU risk, especially with the high risks and climatic changes that threaten the environment.

Since the 1980s, a substantial number of theories have contributed extensively to information and communication technology (ICT) adoption. Much of such theories regarded ICT adoption as a one-off action as they specifically focus on factors affecting decision making at one decision point. They tend to play down on the fact that as adoption decision progresses through stages, they are supposedly influenced by the same or different factors. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to examine the dynamic process of ICT adoption using the concepts of dynamic capabilities.

This study used qualitative approach to gain in-depth insight into the dynamic and evolutionary process of emerging information and communication technology (EICT) adoption in UK small service SMEs. Unstructured and semi-structured interviews were conducted in two separate rounds with 26 participants drawn from Crunch Online Data Base and Luton Business Directory. The participants were selected from a sample of 65 drawn from extended classification of professional service businesses proposed by Ramsey et al. (2008). They include managers, government agencies, SMEs consultants and IT vendors; and then purposeful random sampling and snowball sampling were used.

The study developed a framework from the concept of dynamic capabilities and found that using the concept of dynamic capabilities to examine the process of EICT adoption helps to unveil the recursive nature of the process and how the factors vary at both single and multiple stages of adoption.

This study is limited by its focus and other factors. Studying the opinions of small service UK SMEs limits the power of generalizing the identified causal relationships; therefore, extended measures are required on accounts of environmental, cultural, geographical and sectoral differences. While some errors seemed unavoidable when measures appear subjective and prone to common error biases, the study advised on recognizing the over-riding influence of the factor(s) at each stage of the adoption process in order to be proactive in committing resources.

This work focuses on emerging ICT adoption in SMEs from the dynamic and evolutionary process perspective using the concept of dynamic capability. It advances ICT adoption research by developing a framework to depict that ICT is not a one-off event, rather it is dynamic and interactive in nature and factors influencing adoption vary from one stage or the other.