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The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize the future of academic libraries in the era of new user needs, new skills for staff and services offered. The literature shows the evolution of new technologies and the implications they have on the staff, library services and new user needs. The discussions in this paper are surrounded by conceptualization of what the library products and services will be in future academic libraries. It also looks at future studies that explore opportunities for librarians to advance their professional role.

This is a literature-based conceptual paper that draws on a wide range of literature that hypothetically looks at the future roles of professional librarians, the collection, services and the evolution of technology on the new user needs.

The library today will give the basis for the future librarian’s role, the emerging user needs and impact of service delivery. Technological advances have also affected the establishment of library systems and services offered. The emerging future roles will generally depend on how advanced the libraries are in the region or country including Kenya.

This paper adds a flexible approach to the skills, services as a role of future librarians.

Academic libraries are reengineering their services to address the gap brought about by the convergence of physical and virtual information landscape. Despite the reengineering efforts, as many as 70 per cent of the libraries do not achieve the expected results. Certain critical success factors need to be in place for successful implementation. This paper aims to investigate the key success factors to service reengineering in an effort to establish their extent of application in university libraries in Kenya.

A multiple case study approach of six purposively selected private and public university libraries in Kenya based on Webometric ranking as an indicator of reengineering was used. Data were collected through face-to-face interviews with 30 librarians. The qualitative data collected were analyzed through content analysis.

The following key success factors were found to have been considered during reengineering: top management commitment, planning, provision of required resources, appropriate IT infrastructure, presence of skilled and competent staff, value of the library to the university and teamwork. Despite the central role of training, change management program and having a clear vision and objectives, university libraries in Kenya did not pay any attention to them as deserved. The authors conclude that university libraries in Kenya have not optimally achieved the desired reengineering results as a result of overlooking training and change management as critical success factors. The paper recommends that the identified critical success factors should be considered wholly not in isolation.

The study was carried out among the top-ranked universities according to the January 2017 Webometric ranking; and therefore the findings may give a general indication of the critical success factors considered by university libraries in Kenya. However, this pre-condition may have locked out other libraries that may have made some recommendable strides in re-engineering their services.

This study has practical implications in identifying the critical success factors for library service reengineering to provide insights on the factors to consider as librarians reengineer library services.

Service quality and new electronic services are strategic issues for academic libraries in finding better ways to support learning and research. The aim of this study is to contribute to the literature by identifying the major e-service evaluation criteria from the point-of-view of users of the largest university library in Estonia.

Focus groups were used to identify the most significant criteria of e-service quality. The data were interpreted in accordance with Krueger' seven attributes: words, context, internal consistency; frequency of comments; specificity of comments; intensity of comments; big ideas.

The research brought out the following 15 quality criteria as most important for the university library users: user-friendliness, reliability, assurance, security, speed, credibility, relevance, clarity, competence, feedback, dialogue, participating, responsiveness, empathy, aesthetics. Each of these criteria was explained and discussed.

This list of quality criteria obtained by this qualitative method was considered as the first step to build a conceptual model of e-service quality and as the basis for developing the questionnaire for further quantitative survey.

The study is showing the possibility to design e-services in accordance with users expectations, based on quality criteria important to them.

The study offers a fresh view in analyzing the e-service quality and developing university library services. The study has shown that technological and marketing approaches for studying e-service quality may be complemented by another one – a social approach, based on communication, user participation and feedback.

The purpose of this paper is to explain why some countries in the eurozone between 2010 and 2012 experienced a dramatic vicious circle between hard austerity plans and rising default risk premia. Were such plans too small, and hence non-credible, or too large, and hence non-sustainable? These questions have prompted theoretical and empirical investigations in the line of the so-called “self-fulfilling beliefs”, where beliefs of unsustainability of fiscal adjustments, and hence default on debt, feed higher risk premia which indeed make fiscal adjustments less sustainable.

Detecting the sustainability factor in the evolution of spreads is uneasy because it is largely non-observable and may be proxied by different variables. In this paper, the authors present the results of a dynamic principal components factor analysis (PCFA) applied to a panel data set of the 11 major EZ countries from 2000 to 2013, consisting of each country’s spread of long-term interest rate over Germany as dependent variable, and an array of leading fiscal and macroeconomic indicators of solvency fiscal effort and its sustainability.

The authors have been able to identify the role of these indicators that combine themselves as significant latent variables in boosting spreads. Moreover, the large joint deterioration of these variables is identifiably located between 2009 and 2012 and particularly for the group of countries under most severe default risk (with Italy and France as borderline cases). The authors also find evidence that the announcement of the European Central Bank Outright Monetary Transactions program has improved the sustainability assessment of sovereign debts.

Dynamic PCFA is a rather unusual technique with respect to standard econometric tests of models, which is particularly well-suited to reduce the number of variables in a data set by extracting meaningful linear combinations from the observed variables that may concur to explain a given phenomenon (the dependent variable). These combinations, called “common factors”, can be interpreted as latent, non-observable variables.

The paper investigates the scale of relocations generated by property‐led regeneration schemes and identifies the perceived benefits accruing to occupiers of relocating to such developments. In so doing the implications for the local property market of such moves, in respect of the performance of new and existing developments, are revealed.

Geographical relocation of ventures, together with rates of firm formation and closure, determine the entrepreneurial population dynamics of a region. However, venture migration has remained largely unaddressed by prior entrepreneurship scholars. This paper draws from theoretical frameworks and prior findings in the economic demography literature to explore policy and environmental determinants of regional venture migration rates, referred to as entrepreneurial transience. Using county-level data for the state of Ohio, we show that local taxation is an important driver of entrepreneurial transience. In particular, local income tax rates are found to be negatively related to subsequent net transience – i.e., venture migration deficits or surpluses. Local business property taxes also influence net transience, but the direction of their impact depends on the average income level in the locale.

The purpose of this article is to inform the reader about the collection development principles, the use of technology, the history, and usefulness of ACLS Humanities E‐book.

The approach adopted is a brief history, overview, and review of ACLS Humanities E‐book.

ACLS Humanities E‐book combines a carefully selected collection of academic monographs related to the humanities with a straightforward user‐interface.

The paper offers information about the collection, most important, its collection development model and the considerable value and utility of ACLS Humanities E‐book for researchers and libraries.