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This paper is a study of the current trends and conditions of electronic resources for Chinese studies, based on a recent survey on the Internet of 29 Chinese libraries in North America and eight Chinese libraries in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The survey discussed current electronic resources for Chinese studies, with a union list of major Chinese language databases currently used in libraries in Asia and the US. Current views on the use and development of electronic resources for Chinese studies were summarised.

This paper explores the possibility of adding user‐oriented class associations to hierarchical library classification schemes. Some highly associated classes not grouped in the same subject hierarchies, yet relevant to users’ knowledge, are automatically obtained by analyzing a two‐year log of book circulation records from a university library in Taiwan. The library uses the Chinese Decimal Classification scheme, which has similar structure and notation to the Dewey Decimal Classification. Methods, from both collaborative filtering and information retrieval research, were employed and their performance compared based on similarity estimation of classes. The results show that classification schemes can, therefore, be made more adaptable to changes of users and the uses of different library collections by analyzing the circulation patterns of similar users. Limitations of the methods and implications for applications are also discussed.

When facing the global severe competition, the enterprises all try their best to upgrade the quality, reduce the costs to reach the goal of customer satisfaction. Motorola was the earliest firm creating the term Six Sigma (6 σ); GE was the enterprise successfully fulfilling Six Sigma. The success of these two firms revealed the prominent effects and became the worldclass model enterprises. The main purpose of promoting Six Sigma activity was to reduce the possible defects in the business process to the least through designing and monitoring business process in order to reach the goals such as the best quality and efficiency, the lowest costs, the shortest circular process time, maximum profits and customer satisfaction. This research used the Six Sigma technique to improve the business process of ceramics manufacturing plant and find out the major factors of slower core task time by the analytical process of Process Mapping, Pareto Chart, Simul8 simulation software and figures and proposed the improvement measures. Through the confirmation of the case companies, it successfully reduced the core process time and the organizational costs and increased the capacity.

The purpose of this study was to examine overall customer satisfaction associated with medical service quality in Taiwan by integrated Kano’s model and customer satisfaction index model. Another purpose was to confirmed nonlinear and asymmetric relationship of Customer Satisfaction and Quality Performance by the research outcome. By analyzing 1,100 patients or their family members, this study used the structural equation model (SEM) with AMOS software for data analysis. The results show that must‐be attributes, one‐dimensional attributes and attractive attributes had a direct effect on overall customer satisfaction, Surprisingly, overall customer satisfaction had positively influenced customer loyalty customer satisfaction had negatively influenced customer complaints. The study also found that customer complaints have direct effect on customer loyalty. Importantly, the study found out the must‐be attributes, the attractive attributes and one‐dimensional attributes increased, the level of overall customer satisfaction also increased. The customer satisfaction positively influences customer loyalty in medical service quality in Taiwan. The findings might reveal new insights for researchers dealing with quality of medical service and for hospital managers who devote resources exclusively to achieving highest possible levels of patient satisfaction.

The purpose of this paper is to establish an integrated model of Analytic Network Process (ANP) and Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL), to assist enterprises to process supplier quality performance rating and comparison and find the core improvement direction to create the value of all supply chain members.

This study used the integrated model to process supplier quality performance rating and comparison, which not only improved the order-winners and qualifiers and continued to increase supplier quality performance, but resolved the complex and difficult cause-effect relation issue to find out core improvement items. The cases of Taiwanese industrial computer manufacturers were used to describe the application and benefits of this methodology.

The results recommended that the improvement item of supplier A shall focus on design and quality conformance. The recommended improvement item and order for supplier B is design, delivery reliability and delivery speed. This study established ANP and DEMATEL evaluation models, and expanded the application field in the supplier performance evaluation.

The ANP model is used to calculate the importance of the evaluation criteria, and the DEMATEL method is introduced to consider the impact of the casual relationship of evaluation items and to adjust the importance of the evaluation item, and to solve the complex and difficult practical causation issue.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a modified Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) model and calculates the performance of quality characteristic for the purpose of defining quality improvement strategy.

This study developed modified IPA by introducing the Mahalanobis Distance and multiple regression analysis to evaluate the performance gap and implicit importance of quality characteristics. This paper used a large air-conditioning manufacturer in Taiwan as the case analysis and study targets. It discussed and validated the modified IPA analytical results by studying case history and market analysis.

Through the case study, the quality characteristics of air-conditioning product and service needed to be improved immediately are Green product (Q3) and Repair service (Q10), and the Price (Q11) and Serviceability (Q2) could be kept or enhanced to win the market competitive advantages.

This study developed a modified IPA to help organization identifying key quality characteristics of product and service, and choosing its improvement strategies to win the market competitive advantages effectively.

The purpose of this paper is intended to create a model to measure quality of service, using fuzzy linguistics to analyze the quality of service of medical tourism in Taiwan so as to find the direction for improvement of service quality in medical tourism.

The study developed fuzzy questionnaires based on the characteristics of medical tourism quality of service in Taiwan. Questionnaires were delivered and recovered from February to April 2014, using random sampling according to the proportion of medical tourism companies in each region, and 150 effective samples were obtained. The critical quality of service level is found through the fuzzy gap analysis using questionnaires examining expectations and perceptions of customers, as the direction for continuous improvement.

From the study, the primary five critical service items that improve the quality of service for medical tourism in Taiwan include, in order: the capability of the service provider to provide committed medical tourism services reliably and accurately, facility service providers in conjunction with the services provided, the cordial and polite attitude of the service provider eliciting a sense of trust from the customer, professional ability of medical (nursing) personnel in hospital and reliability of service provider.

The contribution of this study is to create a fuzzy gap analysis to assess the performance of medical tourism service quality, identify key quality characteristics and provide a direction for improvement and development for medical tourism service quality in Taiwan.

Importance performance analysis (IPA) is a technique widely used to assist organisations in developing marketing strategies and improving products or service quality. Many scholars have revised IPA to augment its effectiveness. However, this involves some unknown problems that could lead organisations to make wrong decisions. This paper aims to look at this issue.

As a solution, this paper introduces Taguchi's signal‐to‐noise (S/N) ratio approach to treat ordered categorical data in analysing customer satisfaction and integrates it with gap analysis (GA) through S/N ratio to develop a modified IPA model. A Taiwan air‐conditioning manufacturer maintenance and repair service is illustrated to demonstrate the method.

According to the test case, the modified IPA model obtained more reliable results than the traditional IPA method, considering the central tendency and variance from different customer perceptions. The proposed method can determine exact marketing strategies and improvement directions for product or service quality attributes, reduce variance and (or) move performance to the target value.

This model overcomes the limitations of the traditional IPA model while retaining the merits of the traditional model. Using the modified IPA model an organisation can define its marketing strategies and take action to establish quality improvement activities. In other words, the organisation can avoid making wrong decisions when using the modified IPA model.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the cause-and-effect relationship and the mutually influential level among information security control items, as well as to provide organizations with a method for analyzing and making systematic decisions for improvement.

This study utilized the Fuzzy DEMATEL to analyze cause-and-effect relationships and mutual influence of the 11 control items of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 27001 Information Security Management System (ISMS), which are discussed by seven experts in Taiwan to identify the core control items for developing the improvement strategies.

The study has found that the three core control items of the ISMS are security policy (SC1), access control (SC7) and human resource security (SC4). This study provides organizations with a direction to develop improvement strategies and effectively manage the ISMS of the organization.

The value of this study is for an organization to effectively dedicate resources to core control items, such that other control items are driven toward positive change by analyzing the cause-and-effect relation and the mutual influential level among information security control items, through a cause-and-effect matrix and a systematic diagram.

This study seeks to propose a conceptual approach to assess the perceived service quality properly using Fuzzy logic. First, it aims to verify whether it is a better solution than the Likert scale. Second, it seeks to evaluate patients' feedback towards hospital service quality using Fuzzy linguistic analysis.

The SERVQUAL questionnaire was developed according to the characteristics of each hospital's out‐patient service. Three regional hospitals in Hsin‐Chu, Taiwan were evaluated. After being completed and collected, first, the effectiveness of the Fuzzy linguistic scale and the Likert scale was compared. Second, gap values of each element were evaluated to find the core service quality attributes for continuous improvement. Finally, analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted to segment markets using certain service quality attributes and different demographic variables.

The result indicated that the Fuzzy linguistic scale is higher than the Likert scale in terms of reliability in the measurement. Moreover, through gap analysis and ANOVA, a better focus was achieved on the 8th, 10th, 14th, 21st and 3rd service quality attributes from the SERVQUAL measurement on which management should concentrate and which they should endeavor to work out. The 1st, 2nd, 14th and 16th items from the SERVQUAL measurement can be market segment factors, respectively.

The study successfully introduced Fuzzy linguistic analysis into the Gap theory and SERVQUAL measurements, and provided more internal consistency and stability than the Likert scale. After discussing the findings of the gap analysis and ANOVA, the organization could find the critical service quality attributes and create a value for improving or enhancing them.