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Small libraries can take advantage of alternative funding sources to address their automation needs and thus make available to their patrons the advantages of an “information rich” society. However, careful planning, research to identify receptive funding sources, and consistent, confident, knowledgeable communication of needs and objectives are requisite to the successful solicitation of funds. Burlingame, a university vice‐president who is responsible for fund‐raising at his institution, provides advice on the principles of successful fund‐raising. A sidebar discusses the Foundation Center.

In line with the reappraisal of the welfare state concept started in the 1980s and culminated in the recent economic crisis, governments have reduced the public funding available to cultural institutions. Thus, cultural institutions have progressively adopted more market-oriented practices, rethinking their relationship with the world of business in order to get additional economic resources. This chapter addresses corporate support to the arts and culture in the case of Italy, a country where government has traditionally played a central role in supporting culture. Drawing on the extant literature on sponsorships and corporate philanthropy, we propose a cluster analysis carried out on 160 investments in artistic or cultural activities made by 95 mid-sized Italian companies between 2008 and 2015. Results provide an up-to-date empirical evidence of corporate giving patterns in Italy and suggest an original typology of business investments in the arts and culture. Our study, focusing on the case of a Latin country and on a sample of mid-sized companies, extends the empirical settings usually investigated. Moreover, different from previous studies, we elucidate the influence that the characteristics of supporting organizations have on business investments in the arts and culture.

This is No. 21 of Supplements to Computers in Libraries and reprints papers on online library catalogues presented to the March 1989 Computers in Libraries Conference held in Oakland, California. There are apparently three US procurement documents, Request for Proposals (RFP), Request for Information (RFI) and Request for Quotation (RFQ) which have to be completed when buying new, large‐scale equipment from suppliers and these documents dominate the process of choice and purchase. Several of the papers in this collection deal with completing these forms when acquiring or changing systems, and would have little interest in the UK. The other papers offer more general advice on coping with the problems which arise when manual processes are replaced by high‐tech systems. Such problems are exaggerated in cases where patrons expect more of the system than it can actually deliver. However, what is being described is essentially American practice and library users in the US have a subtly different attitude from that found on this side of the Atlantic. The value of the text to UK librarians would therefore be limited to the opportunity for making comparisons with their own systems.

The following annotated bibliography of materials on orienting users to libraries and on instructing them in the use of reference and other resources covers publications from 1981. A few items from 1980 have been included because information about them was not available in time for the 1980 listing. A few items have not been annotated because the compiler was unable to secure copies of these items.

This paper uses a stakeholder framework to review the empirical literature on corporate social performance (CSP), focusing particularly on studies attempting to correlate social with financial performance. Results show first that most studies correlate measures of business performance that as yet have no theoretical relationship (for example, the level of corporate charitable giving with return on investment). To make sense of this body of research, CSP studies must be integrated with stakeholder theory. Multiple stakeholders (a) set expectations for corporate performance, (b) experience the effects of corporate behavior, and (c) evaluate the outcomes of corporate behavior. However, we find that the empirical CSP literature mismatches variables in terms of which stakeholders are relevant to which kind of measure. Second, only the studies using market‐based variables and theory show a consistent relationship between social and financial performance, particularly those showing a negative abnormal return to the stock price of companies experiencing product recalls. Although this paper shows that the CSP construct is not yet well‐specified enough to produce stronger results, recent research suggests that much progress is being made both empirically and theoretically in developing valid and reliable measures of corporate social performance.