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The article investigates the institutional setup of e-lending in public libraries in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Our point of departure is that e-lending has necessitated new library collaborations between local, regional and national levels, and therefore, institutional e-lending setups have emerged. The study seeks to provide better understanding of how the institutional setups are structured, how governance logics have shaped them and what tensions and dynamics become visible in the key actors’ problematisations of these setups.

The study is situated in the neo-institutional tradition and applies the institutional logics perspective. The research questions are answered by taking a qualitative approach, grounded in an extensive interview study with representatives of libraries, publishers and policy actors in three Scandinavian countries. To provide in-depth insight into e-lending setups, the scope of empirical material is then limited to accounts the central library and policy actors involved in establishing e-lending.

The analysis shows that the e-lending setups are both similar (especially when it comes to financing), and different across Scandinavia, especially when it comes to centralisation and involvement of librarians in this task. The differences are attributed to the influence of different governance logics (question of administrative autonomy, collaboration in the field and existing legal and political frames), and to what extent the digital and market logics are incorporated or rejected in the field.

The study provides new insights into the question of how Scandinavian public libraries face the consequences of the digitalisation of book distribution and consumption by investigating how they organise their e-lending services. This has not been explored before, notably in a comparative perspective.

This study aims to develop a model for integration of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in resource sharing practices for enhanced service delivery in academic libraries in Southeast Nigeria. Seven objectives guided the study; ICT-based resource sharing practices in academic libraries in Southeast Nigeria; ICT infrastructure for resource sharing; ICT needs of librarians for resource sharing practices; stages of ICT integration in resource sharing; perception of librarians towards ICT-based resource sharing; challenges to integration of ICT in resource sharing practices; design a model for the integration of ICT into resource sharing; all in academic libraries in Southeast Nigeria.

The research design adopted for this study is the mixed research design containing the “descriptive survey” research design and the “research and development, R&D.” The population of the study is 164, comprising all of the librarians in federal universities in Southeast Nigeria. All of the librarians of the five federal universities will be involved in the study. Hence, there was no sampling. The instrument for data collection is a structured questionnaire.

The findings of the study revealed that 88.8% of the librarians use ICT to boost the volume of resources; while 74% of the librarians were positive in all responses pertaining to ICT-based resource sharing practices in the libraries. The study also revealed that ICT infrastructures in the library for resource sharing are highly available and applicable; while computers and internet networks are the most needed gadgets for the operations. Libraries in Southeast Nigeria are in the applying and transforming stages of ICT adoption at a 69.7% response rate; while the librarians have a strong belief and understanding that a lot can be achieved in resource sharing through ICT; and would recommend such. Poor electrification, inadequate funding and unavailability of some ICT technologies were equally identified as challenges. The study conclusively developed a resource sharing model, the Southeast Federal University Library Connect; accessible at https://southeastfeduniconnect.njh.com.ng

The research study is one of the few types of research that has developed a functional model for resource sharing in academic libraries in Southeast Nigeria.

The purpose of this study is to assess the awareness and preparedness level of the chief librarians (CLs) of the universities of Punjab and the Federal area in Pakistan concerning censorship. The study also aims to identify the preferred sources the respondents use to update their knowledge about censorship.

The research work is based on the survey method. A questionnaire was used to collect data from the CLs of 105 universities. The collected data was analysed descriptively.

The major findings of the study are that there is a dire need to improve the awareness level of the university library CLs regarding censorship. It was also found that a majority of the CLs do have not any formal written policy to handle censorship issues. However, religion was the main cause of censorship in a majority of cases. The study also indicated that social media was the most preferred source CLs use to update their knowledge.

The current study covers only the CLs of universities of Punjab and the Federal area. Therefore, its findings cannot be generalized to all the library professionals of Pakistan.

The study will help to understand the awareness level of CLs about censorship-related issues and provide an opportunity for university authorities to arrange training programs for the CLs to enhance their capabilities to deal with censorship issues.

The study will provide awareness and preparedness status of CLs regarding censorship issues.

For the provision of smart library services to end users, tools of the Internet of Things (IoT) play a significant role. The study aims to discover the factors influencing the adoption of IoT in university libraries, investigate the impact of IoT on university library services and identify challenges to adopt IoT applications in university libraries.

A systematic literature review was carried out to address the objectives of the study. The 40 most relevant research papers published in the world’s leading digital databases were selected to conduct the study.

The findings illustrated that rapid growth in technology, perceived benefits, the networked world and the changing landscape of librarianship positively influenced the adoption of IoT in university libraries. The study also displayed that IoT supported library professionals to initiate smart library services, assisted in service efficiency, offered context-based library services, provided tracking facilities and delivered effective management of library systems. Results also revealed that a lack of technical infrastructure, security and privacy concerns, a lack of technological skills and unavailability of policy and strategic planning caused barriers to the successful adoption of IoT applications in university libraries.

The study has provided theoretical implications through a valuable addition to the current literature. It has also offered managerial implications for policymakers to construct productive policies for the implementation of IoT applications in university libraries for the attainment of fruitful outcomes. Finally, the study provides a baseline for understanding the adoption of IoT in academic libraries.

Open-access repositories (OARs) are essential for openly disseminating intellectual knowledge on the internet and providing free access to it. The current study aims to evaluate the growth and development of OARs in the field of technology by investigating several characteristics such as coverage, OA policies, software type, content type, yearly growth, repository type and geographic contribution.

The directory of OARs acts as the source for data harvesting, which provides a quality-assured list of OARs across the globe.

The study found that 125 nations contributed a total of 4,045 repositories in the field of research, with the USA leading the list with the most repositories. Maximum repositories were operated by institutions having multidisciplinary approaches. The DSpace and Eprints were the preferred software types for repositories. The preferred upload content by contributors was “research articles” and “electronic thesis and dissertations”.

The study is limited to the subject area technology as listed in OpenDOAR; therefore, the results may differ in other subject areas.

The work can benefit researchers across disciplines and, interested researchers can take this study as a base for evaluating online repositories. Moreover, policymakers and repository managers could also get benefitted from this study.

The study is the first of its kind, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to investigate the repositories of subject technology in the open-access platform.

The purpose of this case study was to complement existing weeding and retention criteria beyond the most used methods in academic libraries and to consider citation counts in the identification of important scholarly works.

Using a small sample of items chosen for withdrawal from a small liberal arts college library, this case study looks at the use of Google Scholar citation counts as a metric for identification of notable monographs in the social sciences and mathematics.

Google Scholar citation counts are a quick indicator of classic, foundational or discursive monographs in a particular field and should be given more consideration in weeding and retention analysis decisions that impact scholarly collections. Higher citation counts can be an indicator of higher circulation counts.

The authors found little indication in the literature that Google Scholar citation counts are being used as a metric for identification of notable works or for retention of monographs in academic libraries.

The aim of this paper is to systematically review the literature published in recognized journals focused on recognition-based heuristics and their effect on investment management activities and to ascertain some substantial gaps related to them.

For doing research synthesis, systematic literature review approach was applied considering research studies published within the time period, i.e. 1980–2020. This study attempted to accomplish a critical review of 59 studies out of 118 studies identified, which were published in reputable journals to synthesize the existing literature in the behavioural finance domain-related explicitly to recognition-based heuristics and their effect on investment management activities.

The survey and analysis suggest investors consistently rely on the recognition-based heuristic-driven biases when trading stocks, resulting in irrational decisions, and an investment strategy constructed by implementing the recognition-based heuristics, would not result in better returns to investors on a consistent basis. Institutional investors are less likely to be affected by these name-based behavioural biases in comparison to individual investors. However, under the context of ecological rationality, recognition-based heuristics work better and sometimes dominate the classical methods. The research scholars from the behavioural finance community have highlighted that recognition-based heuristics and their impact on investment management activities are high profile areas, needed to be explored further in the field of behavioural finance. The study of recognition-based heuristic-driven biases has been found to be insufficient in the context of emerging economies like Pakistan.

The skilful understanding and knowledge of the recognition-based heuristic-driven biases will help the investors, financial institutions and policy-makers to overcome the adverse effect of these behavioural biases in the stock market. This article provides a detailed explanation of recognition-based heuristic-driven biases and their influence on investment management activities which could be very useful for finance practitioners’ such as investor who plays at the stock exchange, a portfolio manager, a financial strategist/advisor in an investment firm, a financial planner, an investment banker, a trader/ broker at the stock exchange or a financial analyst. But most importantly, the term also includes all those persons who manage corporate entities and are responsible for making its financial management strategies.

Currently, no recent study exists, which reviews and evaluates the empirical research on recognition-based heuristic-driven biases displayed by investors. The current study is original in discussing the role of recognition-based heuristic-driven biases in investment management activities by means of research synthesis. This paper is useful to researchers, academicians, and those working in the area of behavioural finance in understanding the role that recognition-based heuristics plays in investment management activities.

The purpose of this study was to develop and validate a scale to assess the influence of Higher Educational Facilities for the growth of education in higher education institutions.

The first step in the process of scale development is to generate an item pool containing as many items as possible which captures the construct of interest. A total of 111 items were constructed for the initial try-out of the scale measuring the construct of higher educational facilities. This rating scale was based on the Likert-type was designed, where each item had to be rated on a five-point scale. The scale consisted of a few items involving the dimensions of infrastructure, quality assessment and quality assurance regard to the vision actualization.

Higher Educational Facilities Scale (HEFS) was developed by the investigator and designed in the format of a 5-point rating scale of the Likert type. There are different phases identified for the scale construction. In the first phase, items are created and the content’s validity is determined. The scale is constructed in the second phase. Pre-testing the questions, administering the survey, reducing the number of items and determining how many factors the scale captures are all steps in the scale construction process. The number of dimensions, reliability and validity are all verified in the third phase, scale evaluation. In developing the scale, the content and face validity was ascertained. The reliability of the scale and its three subscales were established. This scale has potential value for policymakers to assess the perception held by the religious faculty members working in higher education institutions.

The research is part of the doctoral thesis by Dr Deepa Thomas under the supervision of Dr Fr. Joseph C. C. and the co-supervision of Dr Kennedy Andrew Thomas. The purpose of the scale is to assess the higher educational facilities of in institutions of higher Education. Quality, excellence and service are the vision and purpose of higher education institutions to provide ample opportunities and good facilities for their beneficiaries, thus creating tremendous changes in the Indian education scenario.

The purpose of the present study is to identify the active and dead links of uniform resource locators (URLs) associated with web references and to compare the effectiveness of Chrome, Google and WayBack Machine in retrieving the dead URLs.

The web references of the Library Hi Tech from 2004 to 2008 were selected for analysis to fulfill the set objectives. The URLs were extracted from the articles to verify their accessibility in terms of persistence and decay. The URLs were then executed directly in the internet browser (Chrome), search engine (Google) and Internet Archive (WayBack Machine). The collected data were recorded in an excel file and presented in tables/diagrams for further analysis.

From the total of 1,083 web references, a maximum number was retrieved by the WayBack Machine (786; 72.6 per cent) followed by Google (501; 46.3 per cent) and the lowest by Chrome (402; 37.1 per cent). The study concludes that the WayBack Machine is more efficient, retrieves a maximum number of missing web citations and fulfills the mission of preservation of web sources to a larger extent.

A good number of studies have been conducted to analyze the persistence and decay of web-references; however, the present study is unique as it compared the dead URL retrieval effectiveness of internet explorer (Chrome), search engine giant (Google) and WayBack Machine of the Internet Archive.

The web references of a single journal, namely, Library Hi Tech, were analyzed for 5 years only. A major study across disciplines and sources may yield better results.

URL decay is becoming a major problem in the preservation and citation of web resources. The study has some healthy recommendations for authors, editors, publishers, librarians and web designers to improve the persistence of web references.

This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.