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Summarizes the findings of a research project carried out at Aston University. The research investigated the issues surrounding the provision and use of CASIAS current awareness services with individual article supply services and the impact of these services on users, libraries and service providers, with particular attention being paid to the needs and attitudes of users. Places the current awareness needs of users in the context of their other literature‐based activities, and explores the benefits and limitations of the available current awareness, article supply and full CASIAS services, in relation to meeting users’ needs. Concludes with a summary of users’ suggestions about what might constitute the ideal CASIAS service. Introduces the interests of libraries and service providers.

Three separate focus groups were conducted to compare the views of service users, carers and specialist health professionals on community services for adults with psychosis and learning disabilities. Participants were asked which staff, treatments or interventions and methods of working or style of service organisation make a significant contribution to helping people with psychosis and learning disabilities. Although there were few direct contradictions or conflicts between the three groups, the priorities of service users, carers and professionals often differed. Development of community services for adults with psychosis and learning disabilities should incorporate the views of service users and their carers as well as clinicians.

Many services struggle with the dilemma of providing quality residential services to people with learning disability who present behaviours which challenge services. In the last year, one such service in North Yorkshire has begun to develop a more systematic and structured way of approaching this. The introduction of a weekly timetable which incorporates all the service and service user requirements, backed up by training, external professional help and management attention, has seen a decrease in behaviours which challenge, increases in team members' skills and confidence, and increased service user participation both in the house and in the community. This paper describes how this process began and the results for service users, staff and the organisation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the value of appreciative inquiry (AI) methodology in enabling co-productive work within mental health service development.

The methodology of AI is described and observations on its use in mental health service improvement are considered.

AI is a really helpful tool in supporting service improvement and is particularly applicable in mental health discussions involving service users and carers. Many service users and carers engaging with service development discussions have had adverse past experiences which can inhibit their successful contribution to planning discussions. AI allows a more positive reflection on how services can be improved which can help achieve positive results.

AI methodology is a really useful tool in supporting improvement discussions across health, and other public, services, and is particularly valuable in engaging mental health service users and carers in such activity.

The method is useful across service development needs and could be developed to support mental health service improvement locally, regionally and nationally. Developing the use of this method could make a real contribution to improving relations between service users, carers and health staff and support meaningful and positive change in the delivery of mental health services.

Helping to overcome dissonance between service users and carers, and health staff and commissioners; and developing the use of appreciative enquiry could enhance the value of co-production as a key driver for service improvement.

The author is aware of little discussion of the value of appreciative enquiry in the growing literature around co-production in mental health.

This paper explores some of the issues and barriers to service user involvement for people with learning disability in mental health settings. In particular the paper focuses on barriers to involvement including staff attitudes and the involvement of service users in their own assessment and treatment. The issue of getting people involved in their own care is addressed and is highlighted using examples of good practice.

A year‐long review of services was carried out in South Essex by local authority and primary care trust commissioners to help inform future commissioning plans. The review included a focus group to consult service users, carers, project staff and referrers across the area. This was undertaken by SE‐SURG, a group of current and former service users who carry out research and consultation work for mental health service commissioners and providers. The results of the consultation are presented here, particularly in relation to the strengths and limitations of current services, service user aspirations and staff expectations.

It has been suggested that “space and artifacts constitute systems of communication which organizations build up within themselves” (Gagliardi, 1992a, b, p. vi) and reflect the cultural life within that organization. This is a study of how the “landscape” of a public library (“Library X”), as an information retrieval system, relates to the values of the people who created it. The efforts here are geared towards understanding the physical instantiation of institutional culture and, more specifically, institutional values as they are reflected through the artifact.

Users often struggle to select choosing among similar online services. To help them make informed decisions, it is important to establish a service reputation measurement mechanism. User-provided feedback ratings serve as a primary source of information for this mechanism, and ensuring the credibility of user feedback is crucial for a reliable reputation measurement. Most of the previous studies use passive detection to identify false feedback without creating incentives for honest reporting. Therefore, this study aims to develop a reputation measure for online services that can provide incentives for users to report honestly.

In this paper, the authors present a method that uses a peer prediction mechanism to evaluate user credibility, which evaluates users’ credibility with their reports by applying the strictly proper scoring rule. Considering the heterogeneity among users, the authors measure user similarity, identify similar users as peers to assess credibility and calculate service reputation using an improved expectation-maximization algorithm based on user credibility.

Theoretical analysis and experimental results verify that the proposed method motivates truthful reporting, effectively identifies malicious users and achieves high service rating accuracy.

The proposed method has significant practical value in evaluating the authenticity of user feedback and promoting honest reporting.

This paper explores optimal service resource management strategy, a continuous challenge for health information service to enhance service performance, optimise service resource utilisation and deliver interactive health information service.

An adaptive optimal service resource management strategy was developed considering a value co-creation model in health information service with a focus on collaborative and interactive with users. The deep reinforcement learning algorithm was embedded in the Internet of Things (IoT)-based health information service system (I-HISS) to allocate service resources by controlling service provision and service adaptation based on user engagement behaviour. The simulation experiments were conducted to evaluate the significance of the proposed algorithm under different user reactions to the health information service.

The results indicate that the proposed service resource management strategy, considering user co-creation in the service delivery, process improved both the service provider’s business revenue and users' individual benefits.

The findings may facilitate the design and implementation of health information services that can achieve a high user service experience with low service operation costs.

This study is amongst the first to propose a service resource management model in I-HISS, considering the value co-creation of the user in the service-dominant logic. The novel artificial intelligence algorithm is developed using the deep reinforcement learning method to learn the adaptive service resource management strategy. The results emphasise user engagement in the health information service process.

Purpose — New methods of measuring user satisfaction in transport services have been proposed and applied in the literature. In this paper, we compare three alternative measures for estimating user satisfaction: the numerical rating, the ordinal rating and the choice.

Approach — We analysed these measures considering their differences and limitations and the models that use these measures as dependent variables. We developed and applied a methodology to build these models. It comprises a preliminary qualitative analysis and a quantitative survey to identify the most relevant attributes of the satisfaction function, and a stated preference survey to obtain information of the alternative satisfaction measures for modelling purpose.

Findings — The ordinal rating may be a better user response to estimate satisfaction than score and choice based on its characteristics. The results obtained in the application reinforced this approach.

Research limitations — It is assumed that choice, score and ordinal valuation depend upon a latent stochastic satisfaction function of the same attributes. Further research is needed to analyse this assumption and how these responses vary according to the context for decision and exogenous factors, including the response scale of ratings.

Practical implications — Gathering alternative satisfaction responses simultaneously from users allowed for the consistency analysis and filtering of data, which greatly benefited the model estimation process.

Originality/value — The paper provides a methodology to estimate user satisfaction models in transit services, which can be applied in other transport services. The conceptual analysis and the application suggest that ordinal ratings are key user responses to uncover the underlying satisfaction function.