The Open University Library in your pocket

The Open University library is working to support mobile learners through provision of mobile access to information management skills tutorials, the library website, and the library helpdesk. In 2007, we joined hands with the Athabasca University library team to develop the first mobile-friendly version of our library website. Since then, we have been actively researching and developing around other mobile library services, and more recently have consulted users to identify their requirements and what services they–d prefer to access through mobile phones. Recommendations from this user consultation (and from other sources, including regular users' feedback and by tracking user behavior through Google Analytics) include revamping the mobile version of the Library website to offer only the most used services on the home page, implementing SMS (Short Messaging Service) such as loan reminders or library reference service, and developing a consolidated search to offer results from various sources including the library catalogue and e-journals collection

Differences in forecasting approaches between product firms and product-service systems (PSS)

This paper examines the forecasting implications for Product-Service Systems (PSS) applications in manufacturing firms. The approach taken is to identify the scope of operations for PSS applications by identifying all the activities associated with the total cost of ownership (TCO). The paper then develops a revenue model for manufacturing firms providing PSS applications. The revenue model identifies three generic revenue streams that provide the basis for discussion on the differences in forecasting approaches between product firms and Product-Service Systems (PSS) in manufacturing firms. The forecasting approaches are different due to the nature of customer involvement in the service aspect of PSS applications. This necessitates an understanding of the customer service experience and the factors affecting this such as the service profit chain which links profitability, customer loyalty and service value to employee satisfaction, capability and productivity. The forecasting approaches identified raises forecasting challenges for each of the three generic revenue sources. These challenges vary from the difficulty in obtaining the service user’s viewpoint through to difficulties in determining market acceptance of PSS applications

Explaining Health Reform: Uses of Express Lane Strategies to Promote Participation in Coverage

Outlines how, under the 2010 healthcare reform, states could share eligibility data with public assistance programs and federal agencies to expedite enrollment and retention in public coverage, a practice currently applicable only to children

Anonymous reputation based reservations in e-commerce (AMNESIC)

Online reservation systems have grown over the last recent years to facilitate the purchase of goods and services. Generally, reservation systems require that customers provide some personal data to make a reservation effective. With this data, service providers can check the consumer history and decide if the user is trustable enough to get the reserve. Although the reputation of a user is a good metric to implement the access control of the system, providing personal and sensitive data to the system presents high privacy risks, since the interests of a user are totally known and tracked by an external entity. In this paper we design an anonymous reservation protocol that uses reputations to profile the users and control their access to the offered services, but at the same time it preserves their privacy not only from the seller but the service provider

Co-experience Network Dynamics: Lessons from the Dance Floor.

Experience and socialization are key factors in determining customer commitment and renewal decisions in the service sector. To analyse the combined effect of experience and socialization, in this paper we introduce the concept of co-experience networks. A new methodological approach, originally applied in the field of social ethology, is devised to study reality-mined co-experience networks. By analysing a network of health club members over four years, we find that long-experienced clients have a lower chance to renew their contracts. On the other hand, central members in the co-experience network are stable and tend to renew their memberships. Further, since the members of the same reference group align their levels of commitment, renewal decisions are clustered in a small-world network. These findings contribute to our understanding of social dynamics and localized conformity in customer decision-making that can be used to plan marketing strategies to improve customer retention.

TERMS: Techniques for electronic resources management

Librarians and information specialists have been finding ways to manage electronic resources for over a decade now. However, much of this work has been an ad hoc and learn-as-you-go process. The literature on electronic resource management shows this work as being segmented into many different areas of traditional librarian roles within the library. In addition, the literature show how management of these resources has driven the development of various management tools in the market as well as serve as the greatest need in the development of next generation library systems. TERMS is an attempt to create a series of on-going and continually developing set of management best practices for electronic resource management in libraries

A business planning framework for WiMAX applications

Mobile networking refers to wireless technologies which provide communications between devices. Applications for mobile networking have a broad scope as they can be applied to many situations in either industrial or commercial sectors. The challenge for firms is to better match market-induced variability to the organizational issues and systems necessary for technological innovation. This chapter develops a business planning framework for mobile networking applications. This framework recognises the fluidity of the situation when trying to anticipate and model emerging wireless applications. The business planning framework outlined in this chapter is a generic model which can be used by companies to assess the business case for applications utilizing mobile networking technologies