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Humanitarian crises increase vulnerability of children to pneumonia, so aid agencies store pharmaceuticals in advance of this demand. Decisions on how much to store are plagued by many diverse challenges as is common in humanitarian contexts, so this study considers storing more medications to improve the relatively poor (∼80) demand coverage at a representative aid agency.

The paper combines inventory theory with health economics to calculate the impact inventory increases would have on the final cost of pneumonia treatment. It can then assess to what extent inventory can be increased while pneumonia treatment remains cost effective.

The study finds that more drug investment has only a small effect on the final treatment cost. Substantial drug inventory increases remain well within established guidelines for highly cost-effective treatments, so the agency should consider large increases as an efficient use of funding.

The study focuses on pneumonia treatment only to allow sufficient depth of analysis. Further research could look at many other treatments using the same approach, although some problem scenarios will include complicating parameters like drug perishability.

The level of pharmaceutical inventory at humanitarian warehouses is a high-value decision for the aid sector. The method shows the potential for health economics to provide practical decision support for a wide range of humanitarian and ministry of health warehouse operations. While large increases in inventory investment are within guidelines, there is an asymptotically increasing cost as demand coverage approaches 100%. As a result, decision makers may want to set a target demand coverage (e.g. 99%) and allocate remaining aid funding to other projects.

Many humanitarian supply chain decisions lack analytical support due to issues with complexity, scale or a lack of reliable input data, and this study is the first to provide analytical insights which can greatly improve the current approach to inventory control policies for pneumonia medications and beyond.

All seventeen had graciously agreed to my proposal to gather for a small conference to seek consensus. A generous grant from the Pierian Press Foundation would cover all of our expenses for a long weekend at a resort hotel; the only condition of the grant was that we offer our results to Reference Services Review for first publication. Over the past five years each of the seventeen had in turn accepted my challenge to answer the following question:

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.

With this number the Library Review enters on its ninth year, and we send greetings to readers at home and abroad. Though the magazine was started just about the time when the depression struck the world, its success was immediate, and we are glad to say that its circulation has increased steadily every year. This is an eminently satisfactory claim to be able to make considering the times through which we have passed.

The mass media are cultural pipelines through which flow hours of entertainment and information. They represent a part of our culture which critics decry and media specialists praise. They are difficult, if not impossible, to ignore. Television (free, cable, or pay) is the subject of attention of three‐year‐olds and Ph.D. candidates alike. Newspapers are perused daily by all classes and conditions of people and their content, ownership patterns, and circulation statistics are studied in journalism classes, high schools, and by worried editors and publishers. Films entertained children in Nickelodeons, raised the spirits of millions during World War II, and now are the subject of so much analysis that words like ‘pan,’ ‘take,’ and ‘track’ have taken on new meaning in the vocabulary of most ordinary citizens.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the characteristics of social network comments to give a broad overview to serve as a baseline for future research.

English comments from a representative sample of public MySpace profiles were examined with a collection of exploratory analyses, using automatic data processing, quantitative techniques and content analyses.

Comments were normally for general friendship maintenance and were typically short, with 95 per cent having 57 or fewer words. They contained a combination of standard spelling, apparently accidental mistakes, slang, sentence fragments, “typographic slang” and interjections. Several new creative spelling variants derived from previous forms of computer‐mediated communication have become extremely common, including u, ur, :), haha and lol. The vast majority of comments (97 per cent) contained at least one non‐standard language feature, suggesting that members almost universally recognise the informal nature of this kind of messaging.

The investigation only covered MySpace and only analysed English comments.

MySpace comments should not be written in, or judged by, standard linguistic norms and may cause special problems for information retrieval.

This is the first large‐scale study of language in social network comments.

To date, few studies have been undertaken to make explicit how microblogging technologies are used by and can benefit scholars. This paper aims to investigate the use of Twitter by an academic community in various conference settings, and to pose the following questions: Does the use of a Twitter‐enabled backchannel enhance the conference experience, collaboration and the co‐construction of knowledge? and How is microblogging used within academic conferences, and can one articulate the benefits it may bring to a discipline?

This paper considers the use of Twitter as a digital backchannel by the Digital Humanities (DH) community, taking as its focus postings to Twitter during three different international 2009 conferences. The resulting archive of 4,574 “Tweets” was analysed using various quantitative and qualitative methods, including a qualitative categorisation of Twitter posts by open coded analysis, a quantitative examination of user conventions, and text analysis tools. Prominent Tweeters were identified and a small qualitative survey was undertaken to ascertain individuals' attitudes towards a Twitter‐enabled backchannel.

Conference hashtagged Twitter activity does not constitute a single distributed conversation, but rather multiple monologues with a few intermittent, discontinuous, loosely joined dialogues between users. The digital backchannel constitutes a multidirectional complex space in which the users make notes, share resources, hold discussions and ask questions as well as establishing a clear individual online presence. The use of Twitter as a conference platform enables the community to expand communication and participation in events amongst its members. The analysis revealed the close‐knit nature of the DH researcher community, which may be somewhat intimidating for those new to the field or conference.

This study has indicated that, given that Twitter is becoming increasingly important for academic communities, new, dedicated methodologies for the analysis and understanding of Tweet‐based corpora are necessary. Routinely used textual analysis tools cannot be applied to corpora of Tweets in a straightforward manner, due to the creative and fragmentary nature of language used within microblogging. In this paper, a method has been suggested to categorise Tweets using open coded analysis to facilitate understanding of Tweet‐based corpora, which could be adopted elsewhere.

This paper is the first known exhaustive study that concentrates on how microblogging technologies such as Twitter are used by and can benefit scholars. This data set both provides a valuable insight into the prevalence of a variety of Twitter practices within the constraints of a conference setting, and highlights the need for methodologies to be developed to analyse social media streams such as Twitter feeds. It also provides a bibliography of other research into microblogging.

This article celebrates the 50th anniversary of IJPDLM, reflects on the contribution of IJPDLM to the field of logistics and supply chain management (LSCM) and discusses future directions for the journal.

Descriptive analysis of manuscripts received and accepted by IJPDLM during 2015–2019 is used to provide an overview of the journal. Content analysis of selected articles is used to highlight important contributions of the journal. Changes made since 2020 are highlighted to inform future directions of IJPDLM. Invited articles are discussed and used to clarify future directions.

IJPDLM has made tremendous progress in informing and shaping the field of LSCM. Key issues addressed include sustainability and reverse logistics, omni-channel, e-commerce, retail logistics, risk, resilience, volatility, and complexity and digital technology innovation. The journal has expanded the use of methods beyond the typical qualitative and quantitative methods to explore the use of design science, experiment, conjoint analysis, qualitative comparative analysis, narrative analysis. The invited articles provide (1) a historical reflection of the purpose of the journal when it was launched, (2) new guidance on how to develop theories using literature review and grounded theories and (3) understanding of startups and supply chain ecosystems.

Some exemplar articles are highlighted to explain how IJPDLM informs LSCM managers, companies and policy makers.

This article explains the recent development and sets future directions for the LSCM field.