Search results

The purpose of this paper is to explore the change(s) brought about by the advent of electronic information resources in the overall collection development process across agricultural libraries of northern India.

A survey was conducted in 2015 by using a questionnaire as a data collection tool. The investigator also interacted with the librarians through telephone and also availed the e-mail service for required correspondence.

There is a major change in the identification, selection and acquisition procedures across agricultural libraries of northern India, as the majority of these libraries are seen to adhere to an onsite demo of products and services, as the publishers/vendors to set online trial for ample of time before any decision is taken. The libraries are also seen to take advantage of e-mail correspondence to identify, select and acquire best possible information products against utmost economical costs. The responsibility of identifying and selecting the required items devolves mainly with scientists/subject experts, whereas the requisitions of students and suggestions of library staff are comparatively taken as lesser cognisance, while executing this job Library advisory committee is the most prominent authority responsible for final approval of the purchase of e-resources, while “Heads of Divisions” also play a considerable role in this regard.

Only seven agricultural libraries have been taken as a sample. Moreover, the work is confined to only four aspects, i.e. the identification, selection and acquisition procedures adopted and the authorities responsible for carrying out the job. Other aspects like that of adoption of proper collection development; policy and the criteria used for selection; and acquisition of information also need to be studied. Similar studies need to be conducted in other parts of India and also across libraries of other domains of knowledge.

This is a first work of its nature in northern India with its domain as agricultural libraries. The findings will help the librarians and the library advisory committees to decide on logical grounds about the identification, selection and acquisition procedures adopted at present and look forward for bringing about the uniformity and improvement in the process and make changes in the policy to make room for efficient acquisition of information resources.

The purpose of this paper is to identify distinguishing term characteristics from among the information of term appearance situations (tas) residing in the relevant/irrelevant documents retrieved for use. Terms with specific characteristics could be used in the distinguishing of user profiles, documents, pages or concepts to assist in information retrieval.

First, a method to apply the potential term characteristics in the distinguishing of user profiles in the information retrieval environment is designed. Then, an information retrieval system is developed to demonstrate the realisation and sustain the study of the method. Formal tests are conducted to examine the distinguishing capability of the potential term characteristics proposed in the method.

The results of the tests show that the potential term characteristics proposed in this study are successfully applied in the distinguishing of user profiles in the information retrieval environment.

Identification of distinguishing term characteristics would expand the ground for the IR community in the design of feature‐extraction algorithms or systems that try to cull information from structured or unstructured documents.

How organisations interact with and respond to environmental pressures has been a long-term interest of organisational scholars. Still, it remains an under-theorised phenomenon from a project perspective. So far, there is limited understanding of how projects, which are composed by a constellation of organisations, “respond” to institutional pressures that are exerted on them. This research takes the perspective of projects as adopters/implementers of institutional pressures and analyses how they interact with, and respond to, such pressures. More specifically, this research explores how construction projects respond to the pressure of a Building Information Modelling (BIM) mandate.

Multiple in-depth case studies were conducted to explore the practical implementation of a BIM mandate in the UK and understand how the construction projects responded to the coercive pressures to implement a new policy mandate for process digitalisation. Multiple sources were employed for data collection and the data were analysed inductively. The findings identify a hybrid response comprising four distinct ways that projects might respond to an institutional pressure.

We find that projects decouple both from the content and from the intended purpose of a policy, i.e. there are two variance of a policy-practice decoupling phenomenon in projects. The findings also reveal the underlying conditions leading to decoupling.

We advance decoupling literature so that it better applies to the temporary, distributed and interdependent work conducted via projects. Second, we define decoupling in projects as a provisional and fragmented process of wayfinding through heterogeneous institutional spaces, and discuss the potential policy-practice assemblages in projects, influenced by how, if and when project members' activities decouple from the many and often contradicting institutional pressures they face. Third, we discuss how the qualitatively different forms of decoupling that we identified in our work may act as part of a legitimation process in ambiguous situations whereby projects might share a resemblance of conformity with institutional pressures when they are de facto only partially conforming to them.

By analyzing the mechanisms by which rural infrastructure resilience (RIR) impacted population loss in Longxi County, this study proposes measures to improve RIR, which provides a practical reference for realizing China's rural revitalization strategy, besides providing ideas for alleviating population loss in similar regions around the world.

This study considered 213 administrative villages in Longxi County in the Longzhong loess hilly region as the evaluation unit. Based on the construction of a multidimensional RIR evaluation system, the spatial spillover effect of RIR on population loss was determined using the spatial Durbin model (SDM).

The average resilience of each subsystem of rural infrastructure in Longxi County was low, and there were large differences in the spatial distribution. The mean RIR index value was 0.2258, with obvious spatial directivity and agglomeration characteristics. The population loss index of Longxi County had a value of 0.1759, with 26.29 of villages having a high loss level. The population loss was relatively serious and was correlated with the spatial distribution of RIR. The villages with larger RIR index values had lower population loss. The RIR had a significant spatial spillover effect on population loss. Productive infrastructure resilience and living infrastructure resilience (LIR) had negative spillover effects on population loss, and social service infrastructure resilience (SSIR) had a positive spillover effect on population loss.

By analyzing the mechanisms by which RIR impacted on population loss in Longxi County, this study proposes measures to improve RIR, which provides a practical reference for realizing China's rural revitalization strategy, besides providing ideas for alleviating population loss in similar regions around the world.

This paper aims to further the discussion on Building Information Modelling (BIM) legal requirements, providing a framework with key energy parameters capable of supporting the Appointing Party in the definition of the Exchange Information Requirements (EIR) for a BIM project appointment. The EIR is described in ISO-19650–1:2018 as a fundamental step in the information delivery cycle.

A literature review on the topic of BIM energy analysis was completed to identify current knowledge gaps and support the need for the proposed framework. Afterwards, the framework was established based on the review findings and the authors’ domain knowledge. The applicability of the proposed framework was assessed through a case study, where several energy simulations were performed in three different design stages of the same BIM model.

This study identified a lack of standards and legislation capable of supporting the Appointing Party in the definition of energy-related BIM requirements. To this end, a new framework is proposed to mediate existing practices, linking prior knowledge with BIM’s new reality. The study showcases the applicability of the framework, identifying that the performance of different energy studies involves distinct Level of Development (LOD) requirements, which in turn have an impact on the modelling time and cost.

A BIM framework for the specification of information requirements in energy-related projects was developed to support the Appointing Party. The framework presents appropriate parameters for energy analysis in each design stage, as well as the suitable LOD for the BIM model.

This study aims to propose a risk management framework for Islamic banks to address specific risks that are unique to Islamic bank settings.

A unique methodology has been developed first by exploring the dynamics and behaviors of various risks unique to Islamic banks. Second, it integrates them through a series of diagrams that show how they behave, integrate and impact risk, returns and portfolios.

This study proposes a unique risk-return relationship framework encompassing specific risks faced by Islamic banks under the ambit of portfolio theory showing how Islamic banks establish a steeper risk-return path under Shariah compliance. By doing so, this study identifies a unique “Islamic risk-return” nexus in Islamic settings as an explanation for the concern of contemporary researchers that Islamic banks are more risky than conventional banks.

The originality of this study is that it extends the scope of risk management in Islamic banks from individual contract-based to an integrated whole, identifying a unique transmission path of how risks affect portfolio diversification in Islamic banks.

The study aims to explore macroeconomic and banking industry-specific determinants of non-performing loans (NPLs) for Chinese banks, spanning from 2005 to 2014.

It uses three different models to explore the determinants. The first model has only macroeconomic variables as regressors; the second model has only banking industry-specific variables as independent variables; and the third model has macroeconomic and banking industry-specific variables as explanatory variables. Furthermore, system generalized method of moments estimation technique has been used to measure the coefficients of independent variables.

Gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate, effective interest rate, inflation rate, foreign exchange rate, type of bank, bank risk-taking behavior, ownership concentration, leverage and credit quality are significant determinants of NPLs in Chinese banks. Furthermore, the determinants of NPLs for listed and unlisted banks differ. Determinants of NPLs of listed banks include GDP, bank risk-taking behavior and credit quality. However, variation in NPLs of unlisted banks is explained by GDP, inflation rate, foreign exchange rate, bank risk-taking behavior, leverage and credit quality.

This study also finds that using only macroeconomic or banking industry-specific variables as regressors is not a right approach because it may lead to erroneous conclusions.

The emergence of building information modelling (BIM) has led to the need for pre-qualification and selection of organisations capable of working within a BIM environment. Several criteria have been proposed for the assessment of an organisation’s BIM capability during the pre-qualification and selection phase of projects. However, no studies have sought to empirically establish whether organisations selected on the basis of such criteria have actually been the most successful at delivering BIM on projects. The purpose of this paper is to address the aforementioned gap through a comparison of predicted BIM capability and post-selection performance.

BIM capability of firms in a case study was predicted using 28 BIM pre-qualification and selection criteria, prioritised based on their perceived contribution to BIM delivery success from a survey of practitioners on BIM-enabled projects. The comparison of predicted BIM capability and post-selection performance was, on the other hand, achieved through the application of the Technique to Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution and fuzzy sets theory (Fuzzy-TOPSIS).

Findings underscore the reliability of the 28 BIM pre-qualification and selection criteria as well as the priority weightings proposed for their use in predicting BIM capability and likelihood of performance. The findings have highlighted the importance of criteria related as previous BIM use experience as well as information processing maturity as critical indicators of the capability of organisations, particularly design firms.

Overall, the findings highlight the need for prioritisation of BIM pre-qualification and selection criteria on the basis of their actual contribution to delivery success from post-selection evaluation of performance.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the challenges and examine the impact of the transition from print to electronic resources at a medium‐sized academic library at a multi‐campus Caribbean university, The University of the West Indies (UWI), with particular reference to the St Augustine campus.

Through a review of the literature on the shift from print to electronic resources, the paper uses the experiences of The UWI St Augustine to provide a model that can be used by other libraries.

Libraries have successfully built a “hybrid” collection of print and electronic resources despite challenges with information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure, balancing costs, licencing model and strategies for selection, acquisition and management of electronic resources. There are some key steps which libraries can follow when transitioning from print to electronic resources.

The paper focuses on the experiences and lessons learnt in moving a collection from print to a hybrid of print and electronic resources. However, this by no means encapsulates all the issues associated with any such undertaking.

The paper provides some key steps that a library can take in transitioning its collection from print to a print‐electronic hybrid.

Although the literature speaks to different aspects of implementing electronic resources, this paper provides a roadmap for similar libraries with the lessons learnt and simple steps that a library should take when considering to move its collection from print to some level of electronic resources.

Master information delivery plan (MIDP) is a key requirement for building information modelling (BIM) execution plan (BEP) that enlists all information deliverables in BIM-based project, containing information about what would be prepared, when, by who, as well as the procedures and protocols to be used. In a well-conceived BEP, the MIDP facilitates collaboration among stakeholders. However, current approaches to generating MIDP are manual, making it tedious, error-prone and inconsistent, thereby limiting some expected benefits of BIM implementation. The purpose of this study is to automate the MIDP and demonstrate a collaborative BIM system that overcomes the problems associated with the traditional approach.

A BIM cloud-based system (named Auto-BIMApp) involving naming that automated MIDP generation is presented. A participatory action research methodology involving academia and industry stakeholders is followed to design and validate the Auto-BIMApp.

A mixed-method experiment is conducted to compare the proposed automated generation of MIDP using Auto-BIMApp with the traditional practice of using spreadsheets. The quantitative results show over 500% increased work efficiency, with improved and error-free collaboration among team members through Auto-BIMApp. Moreover, the responses from the participants using Auto-BIMApp during the experiment shows positive feedback in term of ease of use and automated functionalities of the Auto-BIMApp.

The replacement of traditional practices to a complete automated collaborative system for the generation of MIDP, with substantial productivity improvement, brings novelty to the present research. The Auto-BIMApp involve multidimensional information, multiple platforms, multiple types and levels of users, and generates three different representations of MIDP.