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THE traditional division of information services into science and technology on the one hand and the humanities on the other, does nothing to improve the provision of information in a multi‐disciplinary subject such as planning. The proposal to make separate provision, within the national framework, for the social sciences, which was put forward by J. E. Pemberton in the November issue of this journal, would only serve to further fragment the sources of information in planning.

The purpose of this study is to increase the understanding of the online brand advocacy (OBA) and brand loyalty relationship through a social identity theory lens.

An online survey was used to obtain the needed data and the relationships of interest were examined using a partial least squares structural equation modelling approach.

Brand loyalty and consumer-brand identification were found to be predictors of OBA, while OBA impacted on purchase intent. In addition, a strong reciprocal relationship was found between OBA and brand loyalty, which has not been reported in prior studies.

This study highlighted OBA's complexity. It suggested OBA is not only an outcome of a consumer-brand relationship but also that OBA plays a key role in the development of such relationships. A consumer's identification with a brand fosters brand loyalty and purchase intent through the giving of OBA.

The more consumers vocalise their brand relationships through OBA, the more they strengthen their relationship with brands. The inclusion of OBA management in brand and marketing strategies should enable organisations to foster opportunities for online consumer-brand interactions that strengthen consumer-brand relationships.

First, unlike previous studies that have used makeshift scales to measure OBA, the authors used a recently developed OBA scale. Second, the important reciprocal relationship between OBA and brand loyalty, which has significant implications, has not been reported in prior research.

Despite an increasing interest in online brand advocacy (OBA) and the importance of online brand conversations, OBA’s conceptualization, dimensionality and measurement are unclear, which has created confusion. This paper aims to answer calls from researchers and practitioners for a better understanding and measurement of OBA. The development and validation of a parsimonious and practical OBA scale is outlined in this paper.

A multi-methods, multi-stage approach was followed to develop a parsimonious OBA scale. From an initial pool of 96 items obtained from qualitative research and from items used in prior general brand advocacy scales, a test-retest reliability study is followed. Academic judges were consulted to verify dimensionality, followed by two separate online surveys to further purify the scale and assess criterion-related validity. Programs including SPSS, AMOS and WarpPLS were used.

This research extends the knowledge of OBA by developing and testing a parsimonious and practical 16-item, four-dimensional OBA scale. Unlike previous attempts to measure OBA, this study suggested OBA as a multidimensional construct with four dimensions (i.e. brand defense, brand information sharing, brand positivity and virtual positive expression). Further, this study showed that OBA is conceptually different from consumer–brand engagement and electronic word-of-mouth.

Future research is encouraged to validate the OBA scale in various contexts and locations. Researchers can use the new OBA scale to examine potential brand-related antecedents and consequences of OBA.

This study provides brand and marketing practitioners with a better understanding of brand advocacy occurring online. The OBA scale offers clear markers or trademarks that will be useful in assessing any brand’s health online and to track and better manage online brand communications and performance.

This research provides the first empirical investigation of Wilk et al.’s (2018) exploratory insights into OBA. The resulting parsimonious scale has furthered OBA as a new area for academic enquiry and presented practitioners with a practical way of measuring OBA.

Newly created spaces are subject to surveillance and control due to the fact that ensuring that urban spaces are viewed as safe is one of the key priorities for regeneration agencies (Raco, 2003). One such space is the Millennium Quarter in Manchester, which comprises a number of public and private spaces, all of which are policed. This paper draws on data from interviews with various patrollers including a police officer, a private security guard and street wardens. All of these individuals expressed the view that the presence of youths was problematic. An important question here is: why are youths seen as problematic or threatening in such spaces? This question will be answered using the Millennium Quarter and its dominant users (teenagers) as an example.

THE NINETIENTH ANNIVERSARY of Sean O'Casey's birth and the recent acquisition by the New York Public Library of the papers of his literary estate afford an opportunity to view, once more, the remarkable achievements of a dramatist of universal distinction. A passionate believer in the cause of man's dignity and freedom, whose plays touched off riots and sparked off controversies, whose works wrung the beauty and passion and heartaches from the experiences of everyday life and ‘whose lips were royally touched’—to quote J. C. Trewin's recent colourful phrase—O'Casey was, with Shaw, one of the few incomparably great playwrights of the present century. Not without his detractors: one critic's jibe that O'Casey is ‘an extremely overrated writer with two or three competent Naturalist plays to his credit, followed by a lot of ideological bloat and embarrassing bombast’ is the kind of factitious reaction one expects from critically immature minds. Shaw's plays, at first, were slighted, but they survived, and today are flourishing; predictably, O'Casey's will enjoy a similar fate. O'Casey is a world dramatist in the widest sense, because he viewed the theatre in the same epic way as Shakespeare and the rest of the Elizabethans.

THE Reference Department of Paisley Central Library today occupies the room which was the original Public Library built in 1870 and opened to the public in April 1871. Since that date two extensions to the building have taken place. The first, in 1882, provided a separate room for both Reference and Lending libraries; the second, opened in 1938, provided a new Children's Department. Together with the original cost of the building, these extensions were entirely financed by Sir Peter Coats, James Coats of Auchendrane and Daniel Coats respectively. The people of Paisley indeed owe much to this one family, whose generosity was great. They not only provided the capital required but continued to donate many useful and often extremely valuable works of reference over the many years that followed. In 1975 Paisley Library was incorporated in the new Renfrew District library service.

MR. DENIS HOWELL, M.P., Minister for Libraries, who was to have told Conference how public libraries had progressed since the Act, had to withdraw and so we did not find out how the responsible minister felt about us.

TWO Government reports in one week—one at first unobtainable because of a union dispute, the other a vast opus of three volumes, with three separate volumes of maps—this was the fate of librarians in Britain during the second week of June 1969. So long to wait for these reports of Dainton and Maud, then so much to read.