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The purpose of this paper is to present such an analytical framework for analyzing Government Interoperability Frameworks (GIFs) and to do a comparative analysis of a set of GIFs using the analytical framework. Based on the comparative analysis, the paper presents a set of recommendations useful for new GIF initiatives.

Drawing on literature and personal knowledge and experience, an analytical framework is proposed for qualitative comparison of GIFs. The analytical framework is based on three core areas of interoperability frameworks – context, content, and process. A total of 21 GIFs are analyzed and evaluated against the framework. The primary sources of information for the study are the interoperability framework documents. In some cases, published articles, brochures, etc. are used as additional sources of information.

The comparative analysis shows that the analytical framework adequately covers all the features of the GIFs. Comparative analysis also shows that most of the GIFs concentrate mainly on technical and syntactical aspects only. Organizational and semantic issues are covered only by a handful of GIFs. At the policy level, most common interoperability policies are found to be: the universal adoption of common specifications used on the internet and world wide web, use of XML for data integration and data management, and use of open standards for all public sector information systems. Regarding management of GIF, it is found that German, Greek and New Zealand GIFs document the process of standards life cycle management in a much better way, whereas UK e‐GIFs' coverage of management and compliance mechanism of GIF is excellent. Overall, it is found that the UK e‐GIF is one of the most mature and exhaustive on all counts. German – Standards und Architekturen f¨r eGovernment‐Anwendungen on the other hand is found to be a unique effort. It incorporates features of both an enterprise architecture and those of an interoperability framework.

The contribution of the study is substantial for academia and practitioners. For academics, this framework can be used in future research as a tool to benchmark and grade GIFs. The practitioners, on the other hand, can use the study, to identify various essential features of a GIF which can be very useful for new GIF initiatives. The six‐layered e‐government technical architecture discussed here can be used to check the current status of technical interoperability in an organization and to identify gaps in the technology coverage.

The main goal of this paper is better understand the risk/return trade-off of investing in socially responsible investment funds (SRIF) and green investment funds (GIF).

To achieve our aim a green investment fund portfolio, a socially responsible investment portfolio and a conventional fund (CF) portfolio from the United States of America (USA) were selected to compare the efficiency of these three different portfolios, by using Value-Based Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methodology.

The results point out that SRIF and GIF are more efficient than CF. For five years, the CFs have not outperformed the GIF.

The results suggest that there is a growing awareness on the part of investors that sustainable companies are the companies that will allow a better quality of life and a more sustainable environment. It seems that somehow managers and investors are aware that the market will compensate them for thinking about a cleaner and more equitable world.

This paper aims to describe and promote the interlibrary loan and document delivery services between North American and Japanese academic libraries. An overview of the overseeing bodies, the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources and the Interlibrary Loan/Document Delivery Committee, is also described.

A descriptive approach is taken to explain the library‐focused programs supported by the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources.

Access to Japanese language resources is increasingly higher in demand. The National Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources has fully supported libraries by providing interlibrary loan/document services between Japan and North America.

This paper provides step‐by‐step instructions for interlibrary loan practitioners whose libraries participate in the Global ILL Framework (GIF) program.

This paper aims to propose and demonstrate a novel surface plasmon resonance (SPR)-sensing approach by using the fundamental mode beam based on a graded index multimode fiber (GIF). The proposed SPR sensor has high sensitivity and controllable working dynamic range, which expects to solve the two bottlenecks of fiber SPR sensor, including low sensitivity and the difficulty in multichannel detection.

The low-order mode of the GIF to SPR sense, which keeps the sensitivity advantage of the single-mode fiber SPR sensor, is used. By using this new SPR sensor, the effect of light incident angle and gold film thickness on working dynamic range was studied. According to the study results, the smaller is the incident angle, the larger is the SPR working dynamic range and the longer is the resonance wavelength with a fixed gold film thickness; the larger is the gold film thickness, the longer is the resonance wavelength with a fixed grinding angle. After the parameter optimization, the sensitivity of these two parameter-adjusting methods reach 4,442 and 3031 nm/RIU.

When the grinding angle of the GIF increases, the dynamic range of the resonance wavelength increases and has a redshift, sensitivity increases, and the resonance valley becomes more unobvious with a fixed gold film thickness. Similarly, when gold film thickness increases, the dynamic range of the resonance wavelength increases and has a redshift, sensitivity increases, and the resonance valley becomes more unobvious with a fixed grinding angle. These adjusting performance aforementioned lay the foundation for solving of the fiber-based SPR multichannel detection and increasing of the fiber-based SPR sensor sensitivity, which has a good application value.

This paper describes the design and implementation of a system for computer generation of linked HTML documents to support information retrieval and hypertext applications on the World Wide Web. The approach is based on work by Salton and others, but extends the concept to be compatible with the World Wide Web browser environment by adding an interactive indexing technique that is well suited to the mouse‐based point‐and‐shoot input common to windowed browsers. The system does not require text query input, nor any client or host processing other than hypertext linkage. The goal of this work is to construct a fully automatic system in which original text documents are read and processed by a computer program that generates HTML files, which can be used immediately by Web browsers to search and retrieve the original documents. Thus, a user with a large collection of information — for instance, newspaper articles — can feed these documents to the program described here and produce directly, without further human intervention, the necessary files to establish World Wide Web home and related pages, to support interactive retrieval and distribution of the original documents.

Academic libraries have long housed multimedia centers filled with digital media production equipment and software. All too frequently faculty members and students alike have assumed that this technology is the key to effective digital media. It is assumed that because our “digital native” students are constantly immersed in media, they can create effective media instinctively. But, being a prolific consumer of media does not necessarily intuit the capacity to be an effective producer of media, and informed communication skills are of greater importance than a student’s software knowledge. This paper aims to describe partnering with faculty on media assignment design, providing a media instruction and consultation program, and providing spaces and technologies specifically designed to support multimedia literacy.

This paper outlines programmatic and pedagogical strategies demonstrated to improve students’ acquisition of multimedia literacy skills. These strategies are based on the authors’ years of experience teaching and supporting multimedia literacy in the university curriculum and beyond. It concludes with a case study detailing a new program that leverages a library’s services in support of student creativity.

The paper outlines an eight-step workflow for media projects that is core to our multimedia literacy instruction program.

With digital literacy garnering renewed attention in higher education, academic libraries are ramping up their services in support of these goals. This paper focuses on strategies for deepening students’ media production competencies, rather than just teaching them software skills.

The purpose of this study is to present a system called NEBULOSUS, which is a fuzzy rule-based expert system for assessing the maturity level of an agency regarding technical interoperability.

The study introduces the use of artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic to deal with the imprecision and uncertainty present in the assessment process. To validate the system proposed and demonstrate its operation, the study takes into account the Brazilian technical interoperability maturity model, based on the Brazilian Government Interoperability Framework (GIF).

With the system proposed and its methodology, it could be possible to increase the assessment process to management level and to provide decision-making support without worrying about technical details that make it complex and time-consuming. Moreover, NEBULOSUS is a standalone system that offers an easy-to-use, open and flexible structuring database that can be adapted by governments throughout the world. It will serve as a tool and contribute to governments’ expectations for continuous improvement of their technologies.

This study contributes toward filling a gap in general interoperability architectures, which is a means to provide an objective method to evaluate GIF adherence by governments. The proposed system allows governments to configure their technical models and GIF to assess information and communication technology resources.

This paper aims to highlight the characteristics of the bibliographic discovery and delivery processes that can either facilitate or impede attempts to borrow materials from overseas libraries. The experiences described represent the perspective of a typical Interlibrary Loan (ILL) practitioner in the USA.

The author draws on his own personal experience with interlibrary borrowing at a major private university research library in the USA.

From a US perspective, the ideal means of obtaining materials from overseas libraries is to locate a potential supplier in Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) WorldCat and use the same system to manage the entire ILL request process. Large union catalogs such as the Karlsruhe Virtual Catalogue are suitable alternatives, as are services specializing in publications from certain countries or regions such as the East Asian Gateway Service or the Global ILL Framework (GIF). The least desirable option is to search and request materials directly through an individual library’s Web site, although the experience can be greatly enhanced through the use of well-designed English language interfaces, easy payment options such as International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) vouchers or credit cards and electronic delivery whenever possible.

This article would be of value for any ILL practitioners in the USA who are involved in borrowing or would like to borrow materials from overseas libraries.

The dielectric properties of materials (complex permittivity) can be deduced from the admittance measured at the discontinuity plane of a coaxial open‐ended probe. This implies the implementation of an inversion procedure. The purpose of this paper is to develop a new non‐iterative inversion methodology in the field of microwave characterization allowing reducing the computation cost comparatively to iterative procedures.

The inversion methodology combines the support vector machine (SVM) technique and the finite element method (FEM). The SVM are used as inverse models. They show good approximation and generalization capabilities. FEM allows the generation of the data sets required by the SVM parameter adjustment. A data set is constituted of input (complex admittance and frequency) and output (complex permittivity) pairs.

The results show the applicability of SVM to solve microwave inverse problems instead of using traditional iterative inversion methods which can be very time‐consuming. The experimental results demonstrate the accuracy which can be provided by the SVM technique.

The paper allows extending the capability of microwave characterization cells developed at Laboratoire de Génie Électrique de Paris.

A new inversion method is developed and applied to microwave characterization. This new concept introduces SVM in the context of microwave characterization. SVM results and iterative inversion procedure results are compared in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the developed technique.