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This paper aims to explore the role played by the National Archives of South Africa in human rights promotion and protection. The study examined the challenges that archivists encounter when undertaking archival functions, such as acquisition, appraisal and access provision, that contribute to forming documentary archives crucial for human rights promotion and protection.

A review of literature dealing with acquisition, appraisal and access was used in this research. It was supplemented with interviews.

This paper provides recommendations of benefits in the field of archives management with a focus on the areas of acquisition, appraisal and access. The transformational discourse in the jurisdiction of archives management challenges archival institutions to be active players in selecting historical and cultural archives’ significance that is significant in human rights protections. However, despite judicial requirements that recommend the importance of archives, there is evidence that archival functions such as appraisal, acquisition and access are not being fully used, resulting in national archives institutions that are subject to irregularities that contribute to an unbalanced archives collection.

The paper was limited only to the National Archives of South Africa.

The paper makes practical implications concerning the acquisition, appraisal and providing access to human rights records.

Sufficient funding resource allocation ought to be provided to advance human rights promotion.

This paper offers informed recommendations to address the challenges of acquisition, appraisal and access provision of archive materials. The availability of archives materials reinforces the community by aiding to protect legal rights and prevent human rights violations. It was, thus, necessary to establish whether the National Archives of South Africa is actively building the archives collections that are important for human rights promotion and protection.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the roles of employee experience and top management commitment in the relationship between human resource (HR) records management culture and HR records privacy control in organisations in Ghana.

Structural equation modelling was used in analysing the data. Following the specification of the model, three main types of analyses were carried out. They were reflective measurement model analyses to test reliability and validity; formative measurement model analyses to test redundancy, collinearity, significance and relevance of the lower-order constructs; and structural model analyses to ascertain the explanatory and predictive powers of the model, significance of the hypotheses and their effect sizes.

The study confirmed that communication, privacy awareness and training and risk assessment are dimensions of HR records management culture. Concerning the hypotheses, it was established that HR records management culture is related to HR records privacy control. Also, the study showed that employee experience positively moderated the relationship HR records management culture has with HR records privacy control. However, top management commitment negatively moderated the relationship HR records management culture has with HR records privacy control.

Organisations committed to the privacy control of HR records need to ensure the retention of their employees, as the longer they stay with the organisation, the more they embody the HR records management culture which improves the privacy control of HR records. For top management commitment, it should be restricted to providing strategic direction for HR records privacy control, as the day-to-day influence of top management commitment on the HR records management culture does not improve the privacy control of HR records.

This study demonstrates that communication, privacy awareness and training and risk assessment are dimensions of HR record management culture. Also, the extent of employee experience and top management commitment required in the relationship between HR records management culture and HR records privacy control is revealed.

Existing literature is still lacking field works that reflect the implications and applications of blockchain in supply chain management. This paper aims to explore the role of blockchain technology in improving the performance of maritime shipping and develop a model to enhance blockchain applicability.

Qualitative data were collected through 28 semi-structured interviews from several supply chain actors in the Middle East and were analyzed based on a thematic analysis approach using NVivo software.

An emerging model for improving the performance of the maritime shipping industry through blockchain technology has been developed. The findings suggest that there are transparency and process efficiency–related improvements as an outcome of Blockchain implementation in the maritime shipping industry.

As shipping industry is largely fragmented, small players find it difficult to achieve great benefits such as those achieved by larger players in the sector. The authors’ model provides guidance for the implementation of Blockchain.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first scholarly works to investigate Blockchain applicability in shipping industry in the Middle East. The lack of a universal standard is a considerable challenge which is still hindering the development of blockchain applications that integrate the different actors.

Municipalities, as the front lines of service delivery, use websites as one of the tools to communicate information to the public. While it is considered a record, many organisations, including municipalities, do not manage websites as such. This study aims to explore the archiving of websites as records in the municipalities of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) Province in South Africa by using the web archiving life cycle model.

This study used a mixed-methods research with an explanatory design, with quantitative data collected first through content analysis of websites and qualitative data collected through interviews. Researchers used multilevel sampling, first quantitatively analysing all available websites of the municipalities (52) in KZN, and then qualitatively selecting only records managers, information managers, web administrators, communication managers and website managers or designers from municipalities because of their understanding and involvement with websites in some way.

This study established that some records on municipal websites are often in paper format in record-keeping systems, whereas others are born digital and are not captured in the systems. Municipalities lack a dedicated web online harvesting tool as well as an archiving policy or strategy to guide website archiving. Furthermore, municipalities placed a high reliance on service providers to keep their websites operational.

It became clear during the interviews that most of the participants were unfamiliar with web archiving. As a result, only 12 of the 56 selected participants from the municipalities provided the required information in relation to the current study as others could not provide answers. Data for other participants were not analysed.

Due to a lack of infrastructure for ingesting digital records into archival custody, a framework for harvesting web content of value is proposed both internally in municipalities and externally to an archive repository.

Despite ongoing research into archival metadata standards, digital archives are unable to effectively represent records in their appropriate contexts. This study aims to propose a knowledge graph that depicts the diverse relationships between heterogeneous digital archive entities.

This study introduces and describes a method for applying knowledge graphs to digital archives in a step-by-step manner. It examines archival metadata standards, such as Records in Context Ontology (RiC-O), for characterising digital records; explains the process of data refinement, enrichment and reconciliation with examples; and demonstrates the use of knowledge graphs constructed using semantic queries.

This study introduced the 97imf.kr archive as a knowledge graph, enabling meaningful exploration of relationships within the archive’s records. This approach facilitated comprehensive record descriptions about different record entities. Applying archival ontologies with general-purpose vocabularies to digital records was advised to enhance metadata coherence and semantic search.

Most digital archives serviced in Korea are limited in the proper use of archival metadata standards. The contribution of this study is to propose a practical application of knowledge graph technology for linking and exploring digital records. This study details the process of collecting raw data on archives, data preprocessing and data enrichment, and demonstrates how to build a knowledge graph connected to external data. In particular, the knowledge graph of RiC-O vocabulary, Wikidata and Schema.org vocabulary and the semantic query using it can be applied to supplement keyword search in conventional digital archives.

Women entrepreneurs face several challenges in creating and running ventures, especially in emerging and developing countries. In this sense, by aiming to generate inputs capable of helping overcome them, this study aims to categorize the policy, managerial and practical implications of articles whose empirical research was in one or more of the 155 emerging and developing countries. Further, although scholars have addressed female entrepreneurship in developed economies, there is scant literature in the context explored here. This article provides suggestions for new studies, helping academics fill gaps in the literature.

This article adopts a systematic literature review approach, performing content analysis and bibliometric description for the sample. The study comprises 77 articles selected from the Scopus and Web of Science databases.

Research concentrates on Asian countries, with lower incidences in Latin America and Africa. The policy implications focus mainly on the executive rather than legislative spheres. The practical implications focus mainly on entrepreneurial development agencies and women entrepreneurs. Among the suggestions for novel studies, those focusing on methodological choices and female enterprises stand out.

This paper maps and categorizes the policy, managerial and practical implications, helping to raise governments’, policymakers’ and practitioners’ awareness of the preferred strategies to overcome the challenges of female entrepreneurship.

This paper emphasizes reflections of mutual interest to researchers, policymakers and practitioners, filling gaps in studies that prioritize an academic audience. Regarding the academic audience, this paper contributes to innovatively categorizing suggestions for future research and building an extensive research agenda capable of guiding research in this area.

While the existing studies largely suggest that valuation uncertainty benefits acquirers, who apply discounts to targets' value attributable to information asymmetry, the authors argue that the opposite may be the case.

Through multivariate econometric analysis of transaction data, the authors establish the link between the degree of valuation uncertainty measured by targets' track of public listing and acquisition premia. The authors use text-mining tools to measure acquirer–target similarity and control for its role in intermediating the posited empirical relationships.

Having analyzed 618 acquisitions involving listed targets from China, the authors find that acquirers pay higher valuation premia for the more recently listed and relatively younger companies than for those with a longer history since floatation. Similar patterns apply to valuation multiples. Higher valuations are partially attributable to premia for control, as acquirers are likelier to buy a majority stake in the recently listed firms, especially if the latter are similar to them. Such transactions take less time to complete and involve a transfer of larger share blocks despite the higher degree of information asymmetry and a frequent lack of targets' operational profitability. The authors also observe a significant premium for target–acquirer similarity: acquirers appear to rush deal completion due to possible overestimation of targets' potential and familiarity bias.

The authors show that acquisition premia may be driven by acquirers' proclivity to place risky investment bets on the growth potential of opaque targets. This pattern may partially explain frequent failures of mergers and acquisitions (M&A).

This study aims to examine the blockchain landscape in supply chain management by drawing insights from academic and industry literature. It identifies the key drivers, categorizes the products involved and highlights the business values achieved by early adopters of blockchain technology within the supply chain domain. Additionally, it explores fingerprinting techniques to establish a robust connection between physical products and the blockchain ledger.

The authors combined the interpretive sensemaking systematic literature review to offer insights into how organizations interpreted their business challenges and adopted blockchain technology in their specific supply chain context; content analysis (using Leximancer automated text mining software) for concept mapping visualization, facilitating the identification of key themes, trends and relationships, and qualitative thematic analysis (NVivo) for data organization, coding and enhancing the depth and efficiency of analysis.

The findings highlight the transformative potential of blockchain technology and offer valuable insights into its implementation in optimizing supply chain operations. Furthermore, it emphasizes the importance of product provenance information to consumers, with blockchain technology offering certainty and increasing customer loyalty toward brands that prioritize transparency.

This research has several limitations that should be acknowledged. First, there is a possibility that some relevant investigations may have been missed or omitted, which could impact the findings. In addition, the limited availability of literature on blockchain adoption in supply chains may restrict the scope of the conclusions. The evolving nature of blockchain adoption in supply chains also poses a limitation. As the technology is in its infancy, the authors expect that a rapidly emerging body of literature will provide more extensive evidence-based general conclusions in the future. Another limitation is the lack of information contrasting academic and industry research, which could have provided more balanced insights into the technology’s advancement. The authors attributed this limitation to the narrow collaborations between academia and industry in the field of blockchain for supply chain management.

Practitioners recognize the potential of blockchain in addressing industry-specific challenges, such as ensuring transparency and data provenance. Understanding the benefits achieved by early adopters can serve as a starting point for companies considering blockchain adoption. Blockchain technology can verify product origin, enable truthful certifications and comply with established standards, reinforcing trust among stakeholders and customers. Thus, implementing blockchain solutions can enhance brand reputation and consumer confidence by ensuring product authenticity and quality. Based on the results, companies can align their strategies and initiatives with their needs and expectations.

In essence, the integration of blockchain technology within supply chain provenance initiatives not only influences economic aspects but also brings substantial social impacts by reinforcing consumer trust, encouraging sustainable and ethical practices, combating product counterfeiting, empowering stakeholders and contributing to a more responsible, transparent and progressive socioeconomic environment.

This study consolidates current knowledge on blockchain’s capacity and identifies the specific drivers and business values associated with early blockchain adoption in supply chain provenance. Furthermore, it underscores the critical role of product fingerprinting techniques in supporting blockchain for supply chain provenance, facilitating more robust and efficient supply chain operations.