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The spread of systems is traced from 1966, when two were operational, to the present time when there are at least 59. The options now available to a librarian contemplating the adoption of an automated loans system are discussed under the following headings: off‐line, on‐line, or hybrid?; source of computing power; data collection devices; book identification; borrower identification; involvement of bibliographic data; source of software. Local considerations and constraints which might affect each decision are pointed out.

From modest beginning a decade ago and foresight in the planning stages has grown an inexpensive, efficient and effective on‐line retrieval system. This paper traces the development and mechanization which resulted in a viable bibliographic information system, describes its present capabilities, and indicates directions for future growth.

The possibility of having access to all the world's literature from a single computer terminal stimulated the imagination of the research workers in the late' sixties. It was this goal and the fascination of the co‐operation between man and machine, that inspired the major changes that have taken place in Information Retrieval over the past ten years.

Viewdata was a British invention. The inventor, Sam Fedida, came to work at the Post Office research centre in 1970, on a “viewphone” project. Apart from providing television pictures of the caller and recipient involved in a telephone conversation, the viewphone was also to allow transmission of computer data. Such a piece of equipment would, it was hoped, increase telephone network use during off‐peak periods.

In the United States the chances of visiting a large industrial or federal library which does not make use of computer terminal capabilities grow increasingly slight. On talking to American librarians it is clear that on‐line computing facilities are regarded, not with feelings of dubiety but as accepted working tools. Their applications include housekeeping activities such as the monitoring of journal acquisition, accession and checking procedures, and the transfer of bibliographic records, in addition to user profile development for current awareness and retrospective searching.

Developing a library while developing oneself is both an enviable and an alarming experience. This case study is valuable for two reasons: first because it is a uniquely realistic blow‐by‐blow description of the upgrading of a poorly organised, under‐resourced, industrial library. As such, it contains useful practical guidance for the many librarians who have similar problems to contend with. Second, and perhaps even more important, because so rare, is the critical and evaluative attitude taken throughout the report. The author identifies his own mistakes, as well as his successes. The report covers the adoption of new information retrieval systems; the devising of a new issue system for a split‐site library; developing periodicals circulation; evaluation of collection use and relevance; proposing the introduction of on‐line services — against a background of financial stringency and entrenched bureaucracy. The author also evaluates his own performance and the training he received, in his first year of running a one‐person library.

After the introduction in October 1970 of the ALS card‐based equipment for recording book circulation, the university, its computing unit and its library underwent various changes which necessitated the implementation in April 1976 of a new circulation system. Describes the planning and design of this new system, its construction and operation, basic functions, and routine and non‐routine output. It is designed to be flexible in accommodating amendments and additions at short notice, and with little or no reprogramming. Details the structure of the system control file, and the other advantages and interesting features deriving from its use. Indicates possible future developments, including the introduction of an on‐line system and isolates 3 defects: insecurity of data; consumption of time and possibility of human error; volume of paper produced. Includes a system flow chart.

The purpose of this paper, building on previous studies of intellectual capital (IC) and business performance, is an exploratory study of how the use of cloud-based accounting/finance infrastructure affects the business performance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A survey method is used to capture perceptions of how cloud-based accounting/finance infrastructure affects business performance in SMEs. The study assumes that although accounting/finance systems are generally regarded as one element of a firm’s structural capital; the introduction of a cloud-based infrastructure in the accounting/finance area has the potential to positively impact on all three elements of a firm’s IC. Based on the survey data collected, a conceptual model was formulated to test the relationship between cloud-based accounting/finance infrastructure and business performance through the prism of firms’ IC.

The results indicate that cloud-based accounting/finance infrastructure has a positive and statistically significant impact on human capital and relational capital. On structural capital, although positive, the relationship is not statistically significant. On the relationship between the three components of IC and business performance, all three elements are both positive and statistically significant. Furthermore, the R2 value generated for the ultimate endogenous construct in the hypothesised conceptual model, i.e. “Business Performance” is 71.3 per cent, indicating significant model explanatory power.

The findings suggest further more in-depth research is needed to explore in detail the effects of cloud-based accounting/finance infrastructure on both the IC and subsequent business performance of SMEs.

Studies on the effects of cloud computing on accounting are scarce. This exploratory research suggests that cloud-based accounting/finance infrastructure can potentially improve the business performance of SMEs. While a valuable finding in itself, more research in this area is to be encouraged.

Data processing at the BLLD falls into four broad divisions; batch operations on large files, such as the serials ordering procedures; information retrieval, such as MEDLARS; specialised systems, such as the processing of incoming telex requests by minicomputer; and the use of on‐line interactive bureau services, for example to do survey analysis. The current state in each area is described, and some general principles governing the use of computers at the BLLD are outlined.

The purpose of this paper is to propose and evaluate XKQSS, a query structuring method that relegates the task of generating structured queries from a user to a search engine while retaining the simple keyword search query interface. A more effective way for searching XML database is to use structured queries. However, using query languages to express queries prove to be difficult for most users since this requires learning a query language and knowledge of the underlying data schema. On the other hand, the success of Web search engines has made many users to be familiar with keyword search and, therefore, they prefer to use a keyword search query interface to search XML data.

Existing query structuring approaches require users to provide structural hints in their input keyword queries even though their interface is keyword base. Other problems with existing systems include their inability to put keyword query ambiguities into consideration during query structuring and how to select the best generated structure query that best represents a given keyword query. To address these problems, this study allows users to submit a schema independent keyword query, use named entity recognition (NER) to categorize query keywords to resolve query ambiguities and compute semantic information for a node from its data content. Algorithms were proposed that find user search intentions and convert the intentions into a set of ranked structured queries.

Experiments with Sigmod and IMDB datasets were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the method. The experimental result shows that the XKQSS is about 20 per cent more effective than XReal in terms of return nodes identification, a state-of-art systems for XML retrieval.

Existing systems do not take keyword query ambiguities into account. XKSS consists of two guidelines based on NER that help to resolve these ambiguities before converting the submitted query. It also include a ranking function computes a score for each generated query by using both semantic information and data statistic, as opposed to data statistic only approach used by the existing approaches.