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The Library of Congress supports the use of open source software in its initiatives, from software development tools to technologies used in its web sites. From late 2008 through spring 2009, the Library of Congress for the first time released its own open source software. This article aims to provide an overview of the issues involved in developing, releasing, building a community around, and supporting open source software, based on the experiences of this project.

Three utilities and a Java Library – the Parallel Retriever, the Bag Validator, VerifyIt, and the BagIt Library – were released on SourceForge, the technology community's hub for open source software distribution and services, under the “Library of Congress Transfer Tools” project.

The tools support validation and transfer of data that conforms to the BagIt specification. The Library plans to release additional tools as part of a suite of solutions and software development resources as they are completed over time.

The article gives an overview of open source software use and development at the Library of Congress.

After over a decade of local digital content production and licensing of electronic journals and databases, and five years of development effort, the University of Virginia (UVa) Library is nearing the time when it can present an integrated discovery and delivery environment for its digital library. The UVa Library is actively developing a digital library repository based on the Fedora open source architecture; the first production release was set to launch in August 2004. The Library is simultaneously testing an implementation of OpenURL and metasearch tools. This article presents the UVa Library's development process in the context of its larger digital library development efforts, including local content production, the implementation of new digital services, and the integration of those services into a unified interface.

There are a number of traditional business strategy theories that have been used to discuss business‐to‐business (B2B) e‐commerce strategy: Transaction Cost Economics, Resource‐Based View, Porter’s Market Forces Theory, and Channel Theory. However, there currently exists no comprehensive framework linking these theories into a method to rigorously assess value delivery strategies, and in particular to determine how to maximise the impact of the Internet as a value delivery channel. This paper answers this shortcoming by introducing a framework that draws together the main theories of strategic choice in a systematic fashion. In particular, the paper examines how different ways of delivering the same form of value (rather than particular products) from producer to customer may allow exploitation of the desirable features of the Internet to different degrees. By using a novel distribution business model from a real‐life case study to illustrate this framework, the paper uncovers several novel ways the Internet can enhance B2B strategy. The main contribution of the paper is the development of a formal, semi‐quantitative model of value delivery strategy evaluation, which can be used as a starting point for practical evaluation of strategy choices in particular settings, and also as a theoretical tool for discussing the role of the Internet in B2B e‐commerce in a more rigorous way.

Depending on the research approach one uses, the development of particular bodies of knowledge over time is the result of a combination of agency, chance, opportunity, patronage, power, or structure. This particular account of the development of geographies of tourism stresses its place as understood within the context of different approaches, different research behaviors and foci, and its location within the wider research community and society. The chapter charts the development of different epistemological, methodological, and theoretical traditions over time, their rise and fall, and, in some cases, rediscovery. The chapter concludes that the marketization of academic production will have an increasingly important influence on the nature and direction of tourism geographies.

Spiritual ecology explores the interface of religions and spiritualities on the one hand, and environments, ecologies, and environmentalisms on the other. As an international environmental movement, spiritual ecology involves a multitude of diverse leaders, organizations, and initiatives. They share a common concern and commitment to pursuing the vital role of religion and spirituality in environmentalism to complement secular approaches to environmental problems and issues from the local to the global levels. Here, after some background, spiritual ecology as a component of the phenomena of international environmental movements is exemplified through three cases: the Green Belt Movement beginning in Kenya, the Green Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Alliance of Religions and Conservation affiliate of the World Wide Fund for Nature (formerly World Wildlife Fund).

Travel and tourism have had a long history in the Nordic countries, but research on tourism has a relatively short tradition in the region. Recently, academic interest in the Nordic tourism space has grown and diversified especially as a result of increasing numbers of academics and institutions involved with tourism geographies and studies and education in the region. The Nordic context has provided thematic focus areas for empirical studies that characterize tourism geographies in the region, with topics including nature-based tourism, utilization of wilderness areas, second-home and rural developments, impacts in peripheries, and tourism as a tool for regional development. In addition, there are emerging research themes outside of the traditional core topics, such as urban, events, and heritage tourism.