Search results

Little is known about the current state of industry standards subscriptions in US libraries. In this age of electronic access and tightening budgets, many libraries are re‐examining whether or not to alter paper subscriptions of standards to electronic versions and/or switch to on‐demand delivery.

Two surveys were conducted in an attempt to gauge the extent to which other libraries are currently collecting standards in electronic format, or providing on‐demand purchasing for industry standards.

The number of libraries purchasing electronic standards or providing on‐demand purchasing in 2003 appears to be incongruous with comments from both surveys. In the 2001 survey, librarians could not find ways to fund on‐demand purchasing and, in the 2003 survey, a number of libraries were purchasing some sets on an irregular basis to save money. A little over half (51 percent) of the responding libraries provide electronic versions of standards and 60 percent indicated they provide on‐demand purchasing of individual standards.

Survey responses resulted in several local changes to improve patron success rates at acquiring industry standard including: created a publicly‐searchable database of locally‐available standards, initiated a purchase on‐demand process, worked with interlibrary loan (ILL) staff to determine which standards would be better to purchase versus request on ILL, and became more adept at reference interviews involving requests for standards.

This paper aims to ask how best to integrate cooperative and demand‐driven collection development in order to simultaneously lower costs, create efficiency, reduce redundancy, increase the range of accessible materials and satisfy patron demand.

By means of example, this paper outlines ways in which the University at Buffalo Libraries are merging demand‐driven collection strategies with cooperative collection development and the rationale behind combining the two approaches.

This paper presents an analysis of three demand‐driven cooperative collection development programs describing the opportunities and challenges posed by such a combination and future directions in demand‐driven collaborative programs.

The paper provides insight into the structure and implementation of academic and multi‐type library demand‐driven cooperative collection development programs with possible applications for other library consortia.

Patron driven acquisitions (PDA) programs have emerged as an important component in library collection practices. The authors aim to report on four PDA programs (two completed, two currently underway) undertaken by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign either by itself or in partnership with a statewide academic library consortium known as CARLI.

The authors use a case study approach based on their professional experience and direct involvement with these programs.

The programs were built on successful partnerships with both vendors and consortial partners; each program was informed by and built on the success of the previous one. The processes can be scaled up and applied to larger systems in order to maximize their impact and user satisfaction.

Acquisitions librarians and selectors will find the local PDA programs of interest, while the consortial approach will be of interest to anyone involved with building and sharing collections in a multi-institutional environment.

This paper aims to analyse how children behave during a purchasing process in a simulated shop and how they put their goals into effect at the Point of Sale (POS). The focus of this research is children in Germany aged between 8 and 10 years. The results reveal answers to the following questions: which criteria do the children consider important when buying groceries? How efficiently and effectively do children pursue the goals demanded of them at the POS? This knowledge can support parents, teachers and educational organisations in teaching children consumer literacy.

Data were collected through interviews and a subsequent observation of the behaviour in a purchase simulation. A total of 436 school children aged 8 to 10 years answered a questionnaire about their behaviour at the POS and perceived demands during the purchasing process as well as their understanding of purchase-relevant concepts. Subsequently, purchase behaviour and decisions in a digitally simulated shopping environment of a supermarket were analysed for a subsample (n = 170). This combination of methods enables the collection of observable decision-making behaviour as well as of the declarative knowledge and the purchasing habits of the children.

Children often act differently from the way they themselves intended and expected during the purchase decision at the POS. Only a small number of children behaved purposefully, whereas the vast majority was distracted by the great amount of stimuli in the simulated supermarket. The results reveal factors that helped children cope with the shopping task and shielded them against purchase impulses from the stimuli at the POS.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to combine questionnaires about children’s declarative knowledge of the shopping process with observation of the real decision behaviour in a supermarket simulation task.

Online retailers have become gradually popular to offer consumers installment payment services in the past few years. This paper aims to study how to determine the duration and rate of installment payment services, as well as the price of products to increase online retailers’ profits.

By modeling the utility functions, the behavior of consumers for strategic choosing the payment method and payment timing is analyzed. Thus, the market segments are obtained through the comparison of the consumer’s utilities. Combined with the given assumptions, the installment payment strategies for online retailers is investigated. This paper focuses on the impact of installment payment services on consumers’ purchasing behavior and online retailers’ profits by modeling and comparative analysis. No installment payment service as a benchmark, it is demonstrated whether online retailers can obtain more profits by offering installment payment services or what are the applicable conditions for installment payments.

If the installment payment service is offered, online retailers can gain more profits and need to adopt appropriate strategies based on different market conditions. During the depression or the peak shopping season, online retailers should take the strategy of free installment rate, and moderately increasing the product price of no installment service. When market demand is stable or during non-peak season, online retailers need to set a higher installment rate and maintain the product price without installment service. Finally, online retailers should determine the maximum duration of installments they can afford based on own risk control cost and allow consumers to freely choose the length of the installment within the duration limit.

First, the authors deeply analyze consumers’ payment and purchase behavior when the online retailer offers the installment payment service. Then, it is theoretically proved why many online retailers have offered installment payment services to consumers from a profit perspective. Finally, this paper proposes the optimal duration of installments, installment rate and product price in different market environments for online retailers, to provide theoretical basis and managerial insights for the development of installment payment service in online shopping.

This study examines the relationship between policyholders’ psychographic characteristics and demand decisions for life insurance products in Uganda.

The study is based on a cross-sectional survey. Using a purposive sampling method, 389 questionnaires were administered to life insurance policyholders in the four geographical regions of Uganda. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was employed to analyze the primary data, specifically to test the relationships between the dependent and independent variables.

The findings indicate a positive and significant influence of psychographic characteristics on demand decisions for life insurance products. In addition, the analysis indicates that the two first-order constructs of psychographic characteristics, namely price consciousness and consumer innovativeness, are positive and significant predictors of demand decisions for life insurance products. In contrast, the third first-order construct religious salience, exhibits a negative and nonsignificant effect on demand decisions for life insurance products.

For insurance practitioners, to influence demand decisions, they should emphasize premium-related appeals in their marketing messages (price consciousness) ignore product decisions based on religious beliefs and norms (religious salience). They should also ensure that insurance products are highly trustable and experiential (consumer innovativeness). For insurance policymakers, it offers an in-depth understanding of customer psychographic characteristics, which can be used to identify exploitative information embedded in certain marketing campaigns targeting specific psychographic characteristics, for better regulation.

The study provides a basis for understanding lifestyle and personality characteristics (psychographics), which may influence demand decisions for life insurance products in a developing country like Uganda, where the insurance industry is at an early stage of development.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-06-2023-0440

The purpose of this paper is to share opinions about where the future of Interlibrary Loan could go by discussing new methods of providing service to users. These methods include the expansion of arenas in which requests are searched, and several purchase‐on‐demand options.

The authors describe a framework in which resource sharing transactions are placed within four domains: free, buy, borrow, and rent. New methods of filling requests are discussed within this framework.

In this climate of constant change there are risks involved with libraries integrating a new company or service into a workflow. Factors such as reliability and stability, user expectations, cost, and license terms and provisions are important to consider. Also, the time it takes for staff to learn new tasks must also be evaluated. Staff should be encouraged to evaluate these factors, balancing them in a cost‐benefit framework and strategy, with a focus on ensuring library user satisfaction. Exploring how alternative sources can adapt to a request system, including billing infrastructure is fundamental to the future of resource sharing.

This article is useful for interlibrary loan staff who want to expand their current services or revise their borrowing/lending workflows.

The purpose of the paper is to explore the factors that drive or hinder organisations to implement socially responsible purchasing.

A literature analysis is complemented with empirical data from interviews with 20 private and public Swedish organisations.

The findings from the literature analysis are compared with findings from Swedish organisations. The study finds that in Swedish organisations, the main drivers for socially responsible purchasing include stakeholder influence and organisational values, media and NGOs' attention and employees' concern. The main barriers are a lack of resources for supplier audits, difficulties to ensure that all suppliers fulfil the code of conduct, differences in culture and management style, low levels of social standards and high levels of corruption in some countries of supply, all of which makes assurance practices a very costly enterprise.

Future research could compare socially responsible purchasing (SRP) practices of focal organisations from different countries and deepen the understanding of contextual factors that shape responses of suppliers situated in different regions.

Although exploratory in nature, this study assists managers and public procurers with a greater understanding of the drivers and barriers of socially responsible purchasing, as well as of success factors for integrating social aspects into purchasing practices.

The paper contributes to the limited body of literature on the drivers and barriers for organisations to initiate and maintain the work on socially responsible purchasing.

This paper aims to conceptualize supply market orientation (SMO) for the purchasing and supply chain management function and discusses how SMO capabilities are developed and how their application differs within and across firms. This research can thus be used as a blueprint for the development of a SMO capability that accommodates a firm’s unique contextual antecedents’ profile.

The qualitative research design comprises five in-depth case studies with 43 semi-structured interviews with large manufacturing and service firms.

SMO is defined as the capability to exploit market intelligence to assess, integrate and reconfigure the heterogeneously dispersed resources in purchasing and supply chain management in a way that best reflects the peculiarities of a firm’s supply environment. The empirical analysis shows that although SMO capabilities are configured similarly, their application varies across and within firms depending on the characteristics of a firm’s purchasing categories and tasks. Hence, reactive versus proactive SMO application is contingent upon firm-level and purchasing category–level characteristics.

The study uses the dynamic capabilities view as a theoretical background and provides empirical evidence and theoretical reasoning to elaborate and endorse SMO as a dynamic capability that firms need to have to compete in a complex and dynamic environment. The study provides guidance for supply chain managers on how to successfully develop and deploy a SMO capability.

The purpose of this paper is to determine how the I‐Share collection serves its members, focusing on the state‐wide use of I‐Share domestic monographs (2003‐2008) by subject, collection overlap (number of copies owned), publisher, and how frequently books by subject are being used and to make recommendations for future selection criteria.

Illinois is fortunate to have the College and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI) consortium which manages “I‐Share,” a 76‐member shared online catalog equipped with patron‐initiated borrowing using the Voyager system. I‐Share successfully circulates hundreds of thousands of books annually among these libraries, dramatically broadening the scope of each member's collection. Data from CARLI's Voyager catalog databases were analyzed via Excel spreadsheets using 20 datafields.

Results found that numbers of copies purchased by I‐Share and use/circulation fell into three categories: high overlap with a corresponding high use, low overlap with a corresponding low use, and a middle area with a high number of copies with low to middle use. Additional analyses by publisher and Library of Congress subject classification were also conducted. The study also allowed for a comparison of what was purchased versus what was available for purchase as represented by the database of a large monograph vendor.

A number of recommendations are made that should improve the effectiveness of monograph selection in the CARLI libraries.

The paper documents an important and thorough study which may be of help to other library consortia in managing more effectively their monograph spend.