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Industry 4.0 is a term for the so-called Fourth Industrial revolutions. It is the technological integration of cyber-physical systems (CPS) in the process of production. CPS enables internet-based process networking with all participants in the process of value creation. The industrial revolution is actually changing how we live, work and communicate. Many trades have highly been affected by 4IR, libraries are one of them. The libraries of twenty-first century are shifting their paradigms from traditional setup to modern information networking. As people and machines are connecting to each other at enormous speed, artificial intelligence, mobile computing, machine learning and automation of every trade have become a need of the day. Automation and artificial intelligence are change agents in 4IR that will make certain groups of employees redundant, replacing them with new workers with the needed skills or with machines that do the job cheaper. This paper aims to shed light on how the 4IR will “shape the future of education, gender, work and library services”. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the challenges being faced by the library and librarians in the age of Industrial 4.0 revolution in contemporary society. The purpose of this study is to review the past literature on Industrial Revolutions 4.0 in education and interlink them with Library services.

The current study performs a systematic and content-centric review of literature relevant to library services. The literature of this study is based on a six-stage approach to identify the design principles and technology trends of 4IR in education and Library services.

Industry 4.0 Revolution is the current trend of revolutionary technology, which has affected many services in this age of globalization. Similar, Library services have highly been affected by 4IR. An effort has been made to highlight the vari-ous challenges being faced by libraries and librarians in this age of information. Some solutions have been presented to the library professionals to overcome this technology to boost its services up to the entire satisfaction of the patrons.

The strategic approach in this study can serve the academicians and practitioners in the field of librarianship as a stepping stone to develop a successful transition from traditional manufacturing into the industry 4.0.

The study is among the first to identify the challenges being faced by libraries and librarians in this age of Industrial revolutions.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the significant structural forms and influencing factors that shape the adoption of technology advances and innovations in society, generally and the property sector specifically.

The paper uses action learning and interviews, literature review, thought experiment and comparative/conceptual/qualitative analysis.

For two centuries, the property sector was essentially “exempt from” and essentially a passive by standing in the industrialization and innovations that transformed the economy. In recent decades, the circumstances changed dramatically; the property sector is rapidly making up for the lost time.

The property market participants who long relied upon, while many property market participants prospered in relying upon long established practices – in some ways more reminiscent of a medieval guild than a contemporary long-standing practice with little attention to, or need to, be concerned about change forces – those circumstances have profoundly changed. Understanding the forces leading to that change and the implications of that change is essential for effective property involvements in the twenty-first century.

Whereas the property sector largely was dominated by a product-focused supplier mentality, the major change forces are shifting more and more access, power to consumers. The result is that society shall have more robust and more user-oriented offerings of property goods and services.

This research distilling the results of the featured keynote address to the London 2000 Cutting Edge Conference provides, and is, the first thoughtful assessment, combining both rigor and relevance to address these profoundly important developments that are shaping and informing the property sector in the twenty-first century.

The World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2016, brought together leaders from the areas of science and technology, business, health, education, government and other fields as well as representatives from the media. A key theme of the forum was what has come to be known as the “fourth industrial revolution”.

News reports and blog posts about the forum gave the impression that this new “revolution” would bring unprecedented advances in science and medicine as well as would hold the potential for a future dominated by intelligent robots and massive levels of unemployment.

For example, on January 24, 2016, Elliot of The Guardian reported that the “Fourth Industrial Revolution brings promise and peril for humanity”. Sensational headlines and sound bites are good at attracting attention but they are not very effective with regard to communicating what this revolution is about and what it could mean for our lives, communities, governments and our workplaces in the near and distant future. The snippets of information reported here and there give the impression that robots, artificial intelligence, cloud-based computing, big data and a combination of other technologies are gradually merging to create a new reality which has the potential for revolutionizing our way of life.

This installment of the Data Deluge consists of an exploration of the fourth industrial revolution, what role libraries might play in this revolution and how our information environment could be forever changed.

Environmental sustainability is quickly becoming one of the most critical issues in industry development. This study aims to conduct a systematic literature review through which the author can provide various research areas to work on for future researchers and provide insight into Industry 4.0 and environmental sustainability.

This study accomplishes this by performing a backward analysis using text mining on the Scopus database. Latent semantic analysis (LSA) was used to analyze the corpus of 4,364 articles published between 2013 and 2023. The authors generated ten clusters using keywords in the industrial revolution and environmental sustainability domain, highlighting ten research avenues for further exploration.

In this study, three research questions discuss the role of environmental sustainability with Industry 4.0. The author predicted ten clusters treated as recent trends on which more insight is required from future researchers. The authors provided year-wise analysis, top authors, top countries, top sources and network analysis related to the topic. Finally, the study provided industrialization’s effect on environmental sustainability and the future aspect of automation.

The reliability of the current study may be compromised, notwithstanding the size of the sample used. Poor retrieval of the literature corpus can be attributed to the limitations imposed by the search words, synonyms, string construction and variety of search engines used, as well as to the accurate exclusion of results for which the search string is insufficient.

This research is the first-ever study in which a natural language processing technique is implemented to predict future research areas based on the keywords–document relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the industry's expectations on the key employability skills of fresh graduates in the communication and media industry. The Fourth Industrial Revolution has raised the question of whether the university should produce work-ready graduates with employability skills. Driven by the theory of human capital, society expects higher education to produce graduates with skills that are useful in their workplace.

The data were gathered primarily through a quantitative survey, which was later extended to include qualitative interviews. Quantitatively, questionnaires were completed by 313 employers from the middle and top-level management from the communication and media industry. This study also expands on qualitative data through in-depth interviews with nine respondents who were among key decision-makers of recruiting graduates to garner their insights on required employability skills.

The findings revealed the following employability skills required by the industry in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: communication, ICT or digital, leadership, interpersonal, and personal qualities skills.

These findings are beneficial to education providers as well as media and communication industries in preparing students and developing their skills to adapt to the changes in the workplace.

The authors provide an empirical understanding of industry expectations towards employability skills in the Fourth Industrial Revolution of the communication and media industry within the Malaysian context.

The third industrial revolution, fueled by the combined powers of information technology, is changing not only the way we work but also our perceptions, definitions and insights into the world. Society will emerge from the third industrial revolution as a global village. Technology and information providers will empower people to find, retrieve, share and use data in ways that enrich their lives.

Currently, China’s economy is in the critical phase of transforming economic development patterns and replacing old growth drivers with new ones. Whether it can successfully overcome the “middle-income trap” has become a significant issue attracting wide attention.

Driven by underlying digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing and big data, the fourth industrial revolution featuring the booming digital economy has provided significant opportunities for China’s economy to “overtake” and overcome the “middle-income trap”. The transformation of economic development pattern, the optimization of industrial structure, and the change of growth drivers, brought by the deep integration of digital and real economies are the keys to leaping over the “middle-income trap”.

From the supply side, the digital economy can improve the quality and efficiency of the supply side and promote the supply-side structural reform and economic growth from the following three aspects: First, promote the quality, efficiency and diversification of the supply system; second, promote networking, opening-up and synergy in the innovation system and third, promote the socialization, modularization and flexibility of production pattern. From the demand side, the digital economy can boost the new drivers of the “troika” of economic growth consisting of consumption, exports and investment by changing the market investment direction, promoting consumption upgrade and fostering export strengths. However, once these two attributes interact with each other, especially when data is combined with capital, the most adhesive factor in the market economy, a series of new social relations will then be produced based on the technical attribute, resulting in significant adjustments in social relations, involving both positive and negative externalities.

To overcome the “middle-income trap”, it is necessary to adapt to the laws of economic evolution and promote a fundamental change in economic growth drivers; boost the high-quality development of the digital economy by strengthening the support role of data in the digital economy; and accelerate digital industrialization and industrial digitalization to realize the integration of digital and real economies.

In this paper, we refer to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 2016, where the concept of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) was coined by Klaus Schwab, with the reference that it would be building on “the Third, the digital revolution” and would be “characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres”. While acknowledging that the 4IR will impact on everything, everywhere, including research and libraries, we conceptualize 4IR, and we compare current academic library services/trends in South Africa with 4IR requirements, through the analysis of 26 public university library websites.

Besides conceptualization of 4IR, a content analysis of websites of 26 public universities’ libraries in South Africa was achieved followed up with verification of the data by respective libraries through a preliminary research report circulated to them by email. 23 areas were identified as the trends in academic libraries, which included free Wi-Fi in the libraries; 24/7 study areas and access to library resources on and off campus; research commons; makerspace; borrowing ICTs (e.g. laptops); e-resources; e-catalogues; research data services (RDS; RDM, IR); open scholarship; information literacy and reference/bibliographic tools, library as a publisher, among others. Data obtained were captured in Excel and analyzed by the research questions.

The 4IR concept does not occur often in literature, in relation to academic libraries, but it is implied. The findings show that the libraries are responding well to the revolution through their services, with remarkable innovation and creativity on display. There was a 64% presence of the analyzed trends/services in the libraries, with emerging trends/services such as library as a publisher (4%), robotics/AI (4%), makerspace (8%), RDS (27%), borrowing of ICTs/devices (19%) and user experience (19%) scoring low, while information literacy and digital scholarship (e.g. IR) (88%), e-catalogue and e-resources (92%), group study area (85%) and off campus access (77%) scoring above 75%. The scatter of the trends/services among the university libraries is noted for knowledge sharing of best practice.

In order to improve accordance with trends, academic libraries have to be better resourced, accessed and used, as well as improve web visibility. The study expects library services to be responsive, resourced and accessible anytime and anywhere, and it provides a conceptual framework and a benchmark for further research and exploration in the country, region and perhaps elsewhere.

The study can be used for benchmarking current and future academic library services in Africa. The conceptual framework provides an agenda for theoretical discussions and deliberations.

The trends, framework and 4IR representations in the study can inform theory and practice in LIS, particularly in Africa.

Linking 4IR to current and future library services provides a tool for academic libraries services benchmarking and development and provides a conceptual framework for theoretical and practical debates and implementation. The study is quite current and appropriate for the ongoing discussions of 4IR implications to academic libraries.

In order to explore the impact of the recent wave of a technological revolution on global culture and society, the purpose of this paper is to re-read the two most outstanding dystopian novels of the mid-twentieth century. George Orwell and Aldous Huxley observe and anticipate technological development in relation to questions of human nature and culture, individual identity and close relationships, matters of care, privacy and private life. The totalitarian regimes both authors experienced in their time have disappeared, yet today the two fields of high technology that fueled their fantasy are reaching levels of development to surpass Orwell’s and Huxley’s daunting visions.

This paper approaches the recent innovations in the information and communication technology as well as the upsurge of life sciences and bio-technology from a philosophical perspective, considering their impact on the social structure (division of labor, distribution of wealth) as well as on the symbolic order of advanced industrial societies (the sign and the body, life and death).

Taking up Michel Foucault’s distinction between ancient sovereign rule and modern biopolitics, the author suggests discerning a third stage of domination: bio economics plus culture industries. In contrast to the two previous forms of domination, this new regime does not endeavor to suppress but to foster and unleash life. Therefore, it instigates less resistance and opposition but meets with more approval and compliance. Domination in this neoliberal-libertarian guise may prove not less dangerous than the former totalitarian variant. It forces the author to re-think ways of resistance and critique.

This paper makes a theoretical contribution to the analysis of care, society and democracy.

Industrial revolutions have been induced by technological advances, but fundamentally changed business and society. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the fourth industrial revolution (I4.0) and derive guidelines for business strategy, it is, therefore, necessary to explore it as a multi-facet phenomenon. Most literature on I4.0, however, takes up a predominantly technical view. This paper aims to report on a project discussing a holistic view on I4.0 and its implications, covering technology, business, society and people.

Two consecutive group discussions in form of academic world cafés have been conducted. The first workshop gathered multi-disciplinary experts from academia, whose results were further validated in a subsequent workshop including industry representatives. A voting procedure was used to capture participants perspectives.

The paper develops a holistic I4.0 vision, focusing on five core technologies, their business potential, societal requests and people implications. Based on the model a checklist has been developed, which firms can use a tool to analyze their firm’s situation and draft their industry 4.0 business strategy.

Rather than focusing on technology alone – which by itself is unlikely to make up for a revolution – this research integrates the entire system. In this way, a tool-set for strategy design results.