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Self-service libraries (SSLs) have been regarded as an effective approach to provide convenient book services to the enormously large populations of China’s cities. These SSLs are in fact automatic book service machines, which provide a combination of services, including reading card issuing, book lending and returning, and book reservations and collection. However, despite acclaimed success, SSL services are not well received by patrons and are underutilised. The purpose of this paper is to identify and understand the causes of the underutilisation of SSL services in Chinese cities.

This study adopted an inductive approach and a case study research design. The SSL services in Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei Province, were adopted as the case study, in which 20 public librarians, SSL workers and managers, and library patrons were approached and interviewed using semi-structured question scripts. The interview data were analysed using a thematic analysis approach.

The analysis pointed to 13 causes in three main themes: management problems, service limitations, and the implicit role of government. Further conceptualisation of the findings revealed that the underutilisation of SSL services has resulted from the absence of a patron-centric perspective and the negligence of patrons’ needs and requirements. Therefore, to increase the popularity and usage of SSLs, it is necessary to develop patron-centric management mechanisms through which patrons’ needs and requirements can be effectively understood and responded to.

This study aims to develop specific suggestions to improve the usage of SSLs. Furthermore, although this study focuses on SSL development in China, this research can provide useful suggestions and implications that can be shared across international borders.

The provision of high-quality e-Government services requires efficient and collaborative sharing of data across varied types of government agencies. However, interagency government data sharing (IDS) is not always spontaneous, active and unconditional. Adopting a stickiness theory, this paper reports on a research study, which explores the causes of data stickiness in IDS.

This study employed an inductive case study approach. Twenty-three officials from the government of City M in Hubei Province, Central China, were approached and interviewed using a semi-structured question script.

The analysis of the interview data pointed to 27 causes of data stickiness in five main themes: data sharing willingness; data sharing ability; data articulatability; data residence; and data absorptive capacity. The analysis revealed that interagency tensions and lack of preparedness of individual agencies are the main causes of data stickiness in IDS.

The case setting is based on China's Government, but the findings offer useful insights and indications that can be shared across international borders.

This paper aims to report on a literature review that aimed to establish a guiding framework for the development of digital scholarship services in China’s university libraries.

The framework was developed through systematically searching, screening, assessing, coding and aggregating digital scholarship services as reported in the existing body of literature. Three types of literature were included in the analysis: international academic literature as reported in English; academic literature in Chinese; and relevant professional reports.

The literature analysis pointed to 25 different digital scholarship services, which emerged in six themes: supporting services, formulating research ideas, locating research partners, writing proposals, conducting research and publishing results.

Although this literature review focused on university libraries in China, the research findings and the guiding framework developed provide useful insights and indications that can be shared across international borders.

This paper reports on a critical literature review, which aimed to identify, understand and qualify barriers that hinder the release of open government data (OGD) in China. Moreover, the purpose of this paper is to develop and propose a theoretical framework, which can be adopted as a basis for empirical investigation in the future, and to articulate mitigating strategies.

This study adopted an inductive qualitative approach, retrieving 42 academic articles from three main Chinese academic databases: CNKI, Wanfang and CQVIP. A thematic analysis approach was employed for the literature analysis.

The literature analysis pointed to 15 barriers to the release of OGD in China. Furthermore, the barriers emerged in the following three main themes: institutional barriers, data integrity and quality barriers, and user participation barriers.

This paper reports on one of the early research efforts into the problems of releasing OGD in China. Although this study focusses on Chinese context and issues, the findings and lessons learnt can be shared across international borders.

This paper aims to explore the impact of domestic market fragmentation on the innovation performance of enterprises and its mechanism from the perspective of market segmentation, a government behavior with Chinese characteristics.

In order to verify the theoretical hypothesis proposed in the previous article, that is, whether domestic market fragmentation can effectively improve the innovation performance of enterprises, this paper bases on the data of listed companies from 2010 to 2016, empirically testing the theoretical hypothesis by constructing a measurement model.

Domestic market fragmentation has a significant inhibitory effect on enterprise innovation performance. Domestic market fragmentation has heterogeneous effects on innovation performance of enterprises and regions. It is undeniable that domestic market fragmentation does have a certain support effect on state-owned enterprises but the support effect is achieved by distorting regional resource allocation and creating an unfair market environment.

Firstly, this paper explores the impact mechanism of domestic market fragmentation on corporate innovation performance from the perspective of market segmentation, a government behavior with Chinese characteristics, so as to expand and enrich the relevant research on enterprise innovation. Secondly, from the perspective of corporate innovation performance, this paper provides new evidence for the “curse effect” of domestic market fragmentation. Thirdly, this paper tries to shake the domestic market fragmentation support theory from the perspective of distortion effect brought by the “hand of support” of domestic market fragmentation.

The purpose of this paper is to present and discuss the process of doing qualitative inductive research in China, drawing its conclusions from a grounded theory study. To be more specific, this paper reflects on the process of approaching interviewees, guaranteeing their participation, conducting the interviews and encouraging responses in the context of Chinese culture.

The discussion in the paper uses Hofstede's cultural dimensions as a tool in the interpretation and understanding of both the behaviour and the preconceptions of the interview participants involved in a research project focused on exploring and explaining barriers and enablers to knowledge sharing between traditional and Western healthcare professionals in China. The context for the study was a public hospital in the province of Hubei in Central China. A total of 49 semi-structured interviews were carried out and analysed.

Despite the grounded theory methodology being applicable in different cultural contexts, the culture itself may present challenges and barriers at both the data collection and analysis stages. These cultural problems may hinder interaction with informants, misunderstanding of responses and behaviours, and thus significantly impair the research validity and reliability.

The paper provides advice and recommendations to researchers aiming at doing this type of study in China.

The paper is of interest to inductive researchers, in particular those using grounded theory, as it describes and discusses the actual application of the methodology in a non-Western context. The paper is also of interest to any researchers intending to undertake participative research in China.

Despite its tremendous success and achievements, the information science (IS) industry has been plagued by shadows of failure and inefficiency since its early days. This paper takes the stance that poor communication with target organizations and users is one of the major causes of these problems. If this communication is not properly recorded and managed, many of the agreed decisions may never be assumed by target organizations, therefore leaving project managers entirely responsible for failures or deviation from initial requirements. Nonetheless, the vast majority of Software (SW) development companies have very weak provision for Electronic Records Management (ERM). This is evident from the persistent use of ISO 9001 and ISO 90003 in their Quality Assurance (QA) and the consistent neglecting of the ISO 15489 standard for records management. This paper aims to examine this issue

Since there are no studies in this area, this research employed an inductive qualitative research approach that consisted of a combination of critical literature review, an exploratory case study and thematic analysis.

This paper reports on the study of an SW company that implemented ERM policies and an in‐house system that not only supports the recording of documentation and evidence for every phase of the development, but also the very difficult processes of organizational learning.

This paper is of interest to both IS academics and practitioners, namely those interested in QA and ERM.

There is very little research in this area that can inform both academics and practitioners on how to use ERM within SW project management practices. This paper aims at providing early insights into ways of addressing this gap and at generating discussion in this area.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss a teaching project and a series of systematic efforts to promote an information literacy instruction (ILI) module and transform it into a successful and well-established massive open online courses (MOOCs). Specifically, this paper provides not only a detailed description and discussion on these transformation processes, but also a comparative analysis of two very different teaching approaches.

This paper focuses on the ILI module in Wuhan University with a top-ranked Library and Information School in China. As a result, this module has been treated as a case study to investigate the transformation processes from a traditional module to MOOCs. Specifically, two research processes are scrutinized in this study, namely, analytic hierarchy process analysis and data analysis on the ILI MOOCs.

It has become evident that ILI is widely considered to be extremely important, not only for university students, but also for a large number of post-college professionals in various industries. Moreover, by using innovation and interactive online techniques, MOOCs have significantly improved the quality of ILI.

If a module is delivered to a large number of students, MOOCs are effective and convenient. To ensure a successful ILI course, this study describes a detailed procedure for transforming a traditional course to a ubiquitous, high-quality and interactive one.

This paper represents early attempts to develop MOOCs on ILI in China. In addition, experience and insight from this study are of interest to university educators and policy makers with implications beyond the Chinese educational system.

This paper aims to present a study of Information Systems project risk management aimed at identifying a risk ontology and checklist that will enable decision making and mitigation strategy planning in information system (IS) development in the public sector. This sector is an ideal research field in risk management practices, due to the visibility that failure of IS/IT projects has acquired as a consequence of the duty of accountability that characterises it.

The study is based on a qualitative approach anchored on a critical literature review, leading to the development of an analytical framework, followed by a thorough case‐study survey.

A project risk ontology was derived from the analysis of ten case‐studies in the UK, USA and New Zealand and was divided into five main categories: pre‐project, customer, project management, technological issues, and development methodology. The analysis found that a considerable number of risk factors are incurred before the start of the formal project and pre‐determine the future of the project and create predictable risks that can be avoided.

This paper has focused on the pre‐implementation and implementation phases of IT/IS projects and further research into IS post‐implementation is required.

The proposed ontology is designed to fit in real life systems development cycles and is aimed at supporting risk assessment and control. The findings suggest that risk thinking should start early in the project and not, as many modern design and development methodologies propose, solely as part of the development process itself.

Effective farmer participation in the rural land consolidation process has become increasingly important because it improves results in rural land consolidation and land use efficiency. The purpose of this paper is to examine the mechanism of farmers’ effective participation in Chinese rural land consolidation.

The authors empirically assess farmers’ effective participation in the rural land consolidation process in ten counties of China’s Hubei province. Focusing on an effective decision-making model, the authors comprehensively evaluated farmer participation using surveys that incorporated an index system and analyzed survey results using a structural equation model to examine factors that influenced farmer’s effective participation.

The results of the study suggest that the correlations between farmers’ effective participation and the impacting factors the authors proposed were particularly strong. In addition, participation ability, participation opportunity and participation incentive are strongly associated with effective farmer participation. Thus, the authors highlight that incentives should be provided to encourage farmers’ effective participation in rural land consolidation.

Because of the chosen approach and the set of the research object, the geographic context of the empirical survey work was limited; furthermore, the authors only studied the influencing factors at the individual level, leaving the interaction effects between governmental factors and farmer individual factors inadequately explained.

Despite those limitations, these results serve as an important reference for government agencies and stakeholder groups in rural land consolidation decision making.