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During the 2001 International Symposium on Forecasting in Atlanta, Peg Young approached me to inquire whether I would be interested in developing an output measure of the transportation sector for the purpose of macroeconomic forecasting. At that time, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) of the U.S. Department of Transportation (US DOT) was interested in developing such a project in order for it to join the company of other federal agencies that produce monthly U.S economic indicators. During next two years with a research grant from US DOT at the University of Albany, SUNY, entitled “The Theoretical Development, Selection, and Testing of Economic Indicators for the Transportation Industry,” I developed the transportation services index (TSI) with the assistance of Herman Stekler as the consultant and graduate student Wenxiong Yao as the research assistant of the project. Needless to say, we had to make numerous visits to Washington to consult with DOT staff and for presentations. Identifying monthly indicators for different sectors of the transportation sector was difficult because transportation indicators had virtually disappeared from business cycle research since the early 1950s. The research project was completed in a year and during the summer of 2003. I went to US DOT headquarters in Washington DC with Wenxiong Yao to train its staff to produce the index on a monthly basis. On January 2, 2004, after ringing the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange, the U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta announced the roll out of the TSI as a new economic indicator intended to measure the total freight and passenger activity in the U.S. economy. Six weeks later, the first monthly release of the TSI on March 10, 2004, marked the official beginning of the series that has been released and updated every month since then, and all reports are now available at http://www.bts.gov/xml/tsi/src/index.xml. The new indicator did not escape the media attention. On April 5, 2004, issue of Business Week, columnist James Mehring noted, “The index provides another sorely needed measure of the service sector. Services constitute about two-thirds of the economy, yet few government reports cover the…[It] should become a new crystal ball for economists and investors to peer into.” On March 15, 2010, the front page of Wall Street Journal reported the recent upward movement in the freight component of TSI, suggesting that the latest recession might have turned around.

The library metadata of the twenty-first century is moving toward a linked data model. BIBFRAME, which stands for Bibliographic Framework Initiative, was launched in 2011 with the goal to make bibliographic descriptions sharable and interoperable on the web. Since its inception, BIBFRAME development has made remarkable progress. The focus of BIBFRAME discussions has now shifted from experimentation to implementation. The library community is collaborating with all stakeholders to build the infrastructure for BIBFRAME production in order to provide the environment where BIBFRAME data can be easily created, reused, and shared. This chapter addresses library community's BIBFRAME endeavors, with the focus on Library of Congress, Program for Cooperative Program, Linked Data for Production Phase 2, and OCLC. This chapter discusses BIBFRAME's major differences from the MARC standard with the hope of helping metadata practitioners get a general understanding of the future metadata activity. While the BIBFRAME landscape is beginning to take shape and its practical implications are beginning to develop, it is anticipated that MARC records will continue to be circulated for the foreseeable future. Upcoming multistandard metadata environments will bring new challenges to metadata practitioners, and this chapter addresses the required knowledge and skills for this transitional and multistandard metadata landscape. Finally, this chapter explores BIBFRAME's remaining challenges to realize the BIBFRAME production environment and asserts that BIBFRAME's ultimate goal is to deliver a value-added next-web search experience to our users.

The simplest part of sound preservation involves technology and its application. The real complexities lie in a mix of social legal, and financial issues. The social issues include how archivists, curators, librarians, historians, or anyone with limited engineering, computing, and other technical training can evaluate competing claims and risks. The legal issues include copyright and the risks that an institution may choose to take about what constitutes fair use and preservation copying. The financial issues include how much of what quality of preservation an institution can afford, and for how many of the items in its collection.

Every second, vast amounts of data are generated and stored on the Internet. Data scraping makes these data accessible and usable for business and scientific purposes. Web-scraped data are of high value to businesses as they can be used to inform many strategic decisions such as pricing or market positioning. Although it is not difficult to scrape data, particularly when they come from public websites, there are six key steps that analysts should ideally consider and follow. Following these steps can help to better harness the business value of online data.

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the basic concepts and principles of linked data, discuss benefits that linked data provides in library environments, and present a short history of the development of library linked data.

The chapter is based on the literature review dealing with linked data, especially focusing on the library field.

In the library field, linked data is especially useful for expanding bibliographic data and authority data. Although diverse structured data is being produced by the library field, the lack of compatibility with the data from other fields currently limits the wider expansion and sharing of linked data.

The value of this chapter can be found in the potential use of linked data in the library field for improving bibliographic and authority data. Especially, this chapter will be useful for library professionals who have interests in the linked data regarding its applications in a library setting.

This chapter presents findings from a recently conducted process for obtaining Accounting Advisory Board (AAB) input related to Master of Accountancy curriculum of one university. Board members represent both large and small public accounting firms as well as corporate offices of Fortune 500 companies and non-profit organizations. AAB input includes perceptions of the relative importance of over 160 candidate topics for the courses making up the program’s infrastructure, as well as written comments noting other potential topics and pedagogical approaches to consider. Comparisons of topic rankings reveal a strong level of consistency among Board member types for the traditional accounting courses with structured content, as opposed to those courses involving more systems-related topics or having a wider range of specialized topics. Furthermore, the authors compare Board perceptions regarding topic necessity to those of faculty and note faculty reactions. Specifically, the authors find that faculty ranking consistency with the Board is weak, illustrating the importance of seeking curricular Board input on an ongoing basis. To “close the loop,” faculty incorporated many curriculum changes, involving both the topics to be covered and the overall approach to the course.

The versatility of customer relationship management (CRM) systems has kept these technologies popular over the years. These solutions have been integrated into organizations of all sizes, from large corporations to small- and medium-sized enterprises. Similarly, CRM systems have also found applications in all types of industries and business sectors. All this has been the driving force behind the proliferation of CRM solutions around the world. In this chapter, the author not only reflects on the impact and democratization of CRM systems on business management and marketing strategies but also explores how these technologies can determine the company's income. In particular, the author presents an experiment that analyzes the extent to which the volume of annual investment in CRM solutions can be used to predict annual net income in a sample of companies. Using time series analysis and applying the autoregressive integrated moving average modeling technique, the researcher examines a sample of 10 companies from different industries, and countries, over a 20-year period. The results show the efficiency of the predictive models developed in nine of the 10 companies analyzed. The findings of this study allow us to conclude that there seems to be an association between the investments made in CRM solutions and the income of the companies that invest in these technologies.

The interaction of systems through a designated control channel has improved communication, efficiency, management, storage, processing, etc. across several industries. The construction industry is an industry that thrives on a well-planned workflow rhythm; a change in the environmental dynamism will either have a positive or negative impact on the output of the project planned for execution. More so, raising the need for effective collaboration through workflow and project planning, grid application in construction facilitates the relationship between the project reality and the end users, all with the aim of improving resources and value management. However, decentralisation of close-domain control can cause uncertainty and incompleteness of data. And this can be a big factor, especially when a complex project is being executed.