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OCLC is in the preliminary stages of developing CD‐ROM‐based resource sharing services and products. A likely scenario has the organization contracting with groups of libraries to extract records, perform bibliographic processing (merging, deduping, authority work), provide CD‐ROM data preparation (indexing and other premastering services), and deliver a finished CD‐ROM union catalog complete with retrieval software. An electronic interlibrary loan messaging system would be available as part of the package.

The previous issue of VINE carried an article on the London Borough of Brent's experiences with URICA; however, it intentionally focussed as much on the performance of the supplier in delivering and installing the system satisfactorily as on the performance of the system itself. This next account of URICA picks up Wiltshire's story after some experiences of live running and looks in much more detail at how the system has been implemented and at how the various applications are behaving in practice. It is still, however, early days in the life of the system and some areas, notably circulation control, will only be truly tested some months hence when all relevant branches have been brought into the system.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate various issues related to Chinese language localisation in Evergreen, an open source integrated library system (ILS).

A Simplified Chinese version of Evergreen was implemented and tested and various issues such as encoding, indexing, searching, and sorting specifically associated with Simplified Chinese language were investigated.

The paper finds that Unicode eases a lot of ILS development problems. However, having another language version of an ILS does not simply require the translation from one language to another. Indexing, searching, sorting and other locale related issues should be tackled not only language by language, but locale by locale.

Most of the issues that have arisen during this project will be found with other ILS‐like systems.

This paper provides insights into issues of, and various solutions to, indexing, searching, and sorting in the Chinese language in an ILS. These issues and the solutions may be applicable to other digital library systems such as institutional repositories.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the state of research on multinationals and emerging markets. For this we look at existing literature from the disparate fields in which multinationals and emerging markets have been explored in the last forty years (1968‐2008). The paper finds that there is a plethora of material on multinationals and emerging markets and our bibliographical search resulted in 1,282 articles with 2,174 authors published in 514 journals. The three dominant disciplines and their underlying journals are management, business and economics accounting together about seventy percent of all publications. In the case of the management and business journals, the top ten percent account for fourty‐three percent of all publications and fifty percent of all citations. The most productive and influential journals are JIBS and HBR.

The purpose of this paper is to compare implementation of short‐run (i.e., small lot‐size) statistical process control (SPC) techniques in just‐in‐time (JIT) manufacturing environments. Using U.S. and Japanese questionnaires, this research focuses on the use of several manufacturing elements such as setup time, stability of process and quality improvement. Barriers to the implementation of short‐run SPC techniques are also examined. Results show significant difference in the way some short‐run SPC techniques are utilized by JIT and non‐JIT manufacturers.

The decision by the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg in the case involving the Belgian footballer Jean‐Marc Bosnian presents the most serious challenge yet to the influence football clubs hold over their players. The court decided that it is a breach of European law for clubs to demand a transfer fee in respect of a player at the end of his contract, as this is a restriction of the free movement of labour as set out in Article 48 of the Treaty of Rome. This paper considers the implications of this decision for professional football clubs in the UK, several of whom record the services provided by their players as assets on their balance sheet. The paper considers various possible accounting treatments and concludes that in the short term at least, given the uncertainties surrounding the industry post Bosman, recording the cost of players' registrations at their historical cost is the most appropriate policy for clubs to adopt. The paper also considers the implications of the case for clubs' fund‐raising capabilities, through interviews with clubs' bankers, finding that banks are more concerned about the quality of income stream rather than the existence of security in the form of transferring players' registrations. ‘If someone regards players as a merchandise with a monetary value, whose value may in some cases even be included in the balance sheet, he does so at his own risk.’

The purpose of the article is to present MARC, a model for assessing – and improving – the health of organisations from a humanistic point of view.

The model has been developed in an organisational development clinical research tradition. The validity of the model rests on logical reasoning grounded in organisational and salutogenic research, and on it appearing useful to clients and members in organisations where it has been employed.

When using the MARC model to structure analyses and facilitate discussions in organisations that have sought aid, the model has helped reveal major sources of imbalance between its four aspects: meaning, authority, rationality and care. A major survey revealed no statistically significant differences between men and women. This indicates that the MARC concepts are general rather than gender‐specific. The results also contradicted the often stated notion that men emphasise “hard” aspects (A and R) while women emphasise “soft” ones (M and C).

The paper demonstrates that support for the importance of each of the four aspects – meaning, authority, rationality and care – as perspectives in analysing and understanding organisations can be found in the organisational research literature. The authors' contribution is to argue the case that they represent four important human needs that need to be attended to in balance in an organisation if cooperation between the individuals in the organisation is to be sustainable from a human‐centred perspective. MARC is designed to help visualise and focus this balance.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the implementation of short‐run (i.e., small lot‐size) statistical process control (SPC) techniques for manufacturing between the U.S. and Japan. Using U.S. and Japanese questionnaires, this research focuses on the use of several manufacturing management elements such as setup time, stability of process, and quality improvement. These elements are compared in terms of their respective countries’ short‐run SPC techniques implementation. Barriers to the implementation of short‐run SPC techniques are also examined. In addition, this research identifies current process control techniques used to support short‐run SPC in both countries. Results show how the significantly different short‐run SPC techniques are utilized in the U.S. and Japan.