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Various measurement models may be employed to obtain attitude or perception data. Some protocols employ a ‘gap measurement model’ to frame perceptions. One important benefit of using a gap measurement model is that tools such as LibQUAL??inherently incorporate a natural lie or random‐response scale. The present study investigates performance of scores on the scale for the 4407 LibQUAL??Phase One participants. This paper was presented at the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Measuring Service Quality Symposium on the New Culture of Assessment: Measuring Service Quality, Washington, DC, 20‐21 October, 2000.

Government contracting is rife with miscommunication and misperception, sometimes unavoidably, and is often associated with secrecy, autarky, and opportunism. These qualities undermine trust, increase contracting costs, and reduce effective collaboration between business and government. In this article we show how mutual trust can be repaired and, once repaired, bumped up and made much more robust through cultivational governance. The proximate aim of the article is improving source-selection in government acquisition; its scholarly purpose lies in contributing to a process theory for recovering and reinforcing trust.

Seeks to explore the gap that exists between knowledge management (KM) systems and the natural language materials that form almost all corporate data stores.

A conceptual discussion and approach are taken using recent scientific results in the fields of the semantic web and ontology‐based information extraction.

Provides a high‐level introduction to information extraction (IE) and descriptions of application scenarios for KM tools that exploit IE, a form of natural language analysis to link semantic web models with documents. The paper presents some examples of ontology‐based IE systems, one of which, KIM, is under development in the SEKT Project. KIM offers IE‐based facilities for metadata creation, storage and conceptual search. The system can be used by diverse applications for annotating and querying documents.

Focuses on technologies and facilities that will become an important part of next‐generation KM applications.

One of the most colorful and free‐spirited publishers in U.S. history, the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company of Chicago has also made an impressive mark on that history. As this country's oldest alternative publishing house—founded in 1886—it has been closely associated with such movements as populism, freethought, socialism, and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), as well as various currents of labor and social radicalism of more recent years. The Kerr Company has also established itself as a leading publisher of original works and reprints in the field of labor and radical history. Several generations of America's progressives and dissidents have relied heavily on Kerr publications for their education and inspiration. For libraries with a focus on labor, politics, women, reform movements, anarchism, socialism, pacifism, radical fiction, popular culture, and the broad counter‐culture, Kerr books are indispensable.

Revelation of controversial fundraising practices by the Clinton‐Gore reelection campaign in 1996 and continuing controversy over proposed campaign finance reform legislation has brought this subject into public focus and discussion. This article provides an overview of key recent developments in campaign finance accompanied by coverage of literature and Web sites produced by scholars, government agencies, and participants in the ongoing debate over campaign finance and its role in the American political process.

This paper aims to examine the evolution of the advertising agency and its offices in Australia over the course of the twentieth century. Historical accounts of advertising have paid scant attention to agencies’ attempts to organise and manage their offices, as well as the impact that these efforts has had on the work undertaken by agency staff.

This study draws on reports in the advertising industry press, as well as oral history testimony to examine the agencies’ changing layout and interior design. It identifies three distinct periods, which reveal the impact of modernist and post-industrialist ideas on the organisation and functions of the advertising agency’s offices and, indeed, their impact on the agency’s outputs.

This examination of the office space within the agency setting not only offers a new perspective of the advertising agency business as a whole but also demonstrates the importance of material culture for historians working across management, business and marketing fields.

The originality of this study lies in its use of material culture and space as a tool for examining management history and understanding its impact on everyday work practices. By charting the changes reflected in advertising agency office spaces, this study also offers a unique overview of the ways that management practices have historically interacted with business work spaces.

This column is a reminiscent piece about how the origin of my work in the social studies and social justice was launched by a thoughtful and dedicated renaissance teacher.

At all levels of government, inconsistencies exist regarding the terminology and the body of knowledge used to understand public procurement. Perspectives on what public procurement is, or should be, ranges from routine ordering to sophisticated analysis of government spending. Definitional ambiguities have hampered attempts to define the field and unify its focus. This exploratory article examines the implications of the muddled nature of public procurement that has led to debate and uncertainty about the proper role of public procurement practitioners. To address these limitations, three dimensions of all public procurement systems are identified, and a general definition is proposed for describing the field and its institutionalized practices.

In the world of public budgeting, ideas and concepts often come, go, and then resurface years later in a slightly modified version. Performance budgeting was first abandoned in the 1960s; this paper examines its rebirth in an attempt to determine if it will make a significant contribution to American budgeting in the 21st century. Does it make for better budgetary decisions? What are the questions that performance budgeting is supposed to answer? Is it just another procedure that helps avoid focusing on problems of our “capacity to govern” (Schick, 1990)? The paper concludes that while there are positive things to say about the drive to performance budgeting, the Office of Management and Budget should not recommend blanket adoption.