Conceptual design of an e-marketplace for small and medium enterprises in the Turkish machinery industry

This paper reports on the results of a study carried out in the Turkish machinery industry. The purpose of the study was to identify the benefits the sector can seize from e-business and to develop a conceptual framework for potential e-business applications. We analysed the current state of e-business use in the machinery industry in order to understand the future requirements and application opportunities and to come up with a conceptual e-business design that would suit both the needs and the characteristics of the sector. The study included those companies, which are members of the Machine Manufacturers’ Association (MMA) in Turkey. Information about the existing applications and future requirements was obtained from the results of a survey conducted among the member companies. Statistically adequate number of responses was obtained to make the results representative of the machine industry. Web sites of the member companies were also reviewed for further information gathering. Results indicated that most of the companies are Small and Medium Enterprises(SME) and it would be better for them to carry out certain operations through an e-market specifically designed for the sector. The proposed conceptual e-market design is based on the characteristics of the industry emerging from the survey

Reference catalogue for ICT services in healthcare : model for ICT service management, controlling and benchmarking : version 1.0

Translation of the German original

What do faculty and students really think about e-books?

Purpose - The purpose of this article is to report on a large-scale survey that was carried Out to assess academic users' awareness, perceptions and existing levels of use of e-books. The survey also seeks to find out about the purposes to which electronic books were put, and to obtain an understanding of the most effective library marketing and communication channels.Design/methodology/approach - An e-mail invitation to participate in the survey was distributed to all UCL staff and students (approximately 27,000) in November 2006, and 1,818 completions were received, an effective response rate of at least 6.7 per cent. Statistical analyses were carried out on the data using Software Package for Social Sciences (SPSS).Findings - The survey findings point to various ways in which user uptake and acceptance of e-books may be encouraged. Book discovery behaviour, a key issue for publishers and librarians in both print and electronic environments, emerges as a critical focus for service delivery and enhancement.Originality/value - The survey is part of an action research project, CIBER's SuperBook, that will further investigate the issues raised in this initial benchmarking survey using deep log analysis and qualitative methods. The paper partly fills the gap in the literature on e-books which has mainly focused on usage and not the users

Future internet enablers for VGI applications

This paper presents the authors experiences with the development of mobile Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) applications in the context of the ENVIROFI project and Future Internet Public Private Partnership (FI-PPP) FP7 research programme.FI-PPP has an ambitious goal of developing a set of Generic FI Enablers (GEs) - software and hardware tools that will simplify development of thematic future internet applications. Our role in the programme was to provide requirements and assess the usability of the GEs from the point of view of the environmental usage area, In addition, we specified and developed three proof of concept implementations of environmental FI applications, and a set of specific environmental enablers (SEs) complementing the functionality offered by GEs. Rather than trying to rebuild the whole infrastructure of the Environmental Information Space (EIS), we concentrated on two aspects: (1) how to assure the existing and future EIS services and applications can be integrated and reused in FI context; and (2) how to profit from the GEs in future environmental applications.This paper concentrates on the GEs and SEs which were used in two of the ENVIROFI pilots which are representative for the emerging class of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) use-cases: one of them is pertinent to biodiversity and another to influence of weather and airborne pollution on users’ wellbeing. In VGI applications, the EIS and SensorWeb overlap with the Social web and potentially huge amounts of information from mobile citizens needs to be assessed and fused with the observations from official sources. On the whole, the authors are confident that the FI-PPP programme will greatly influence the EIS, but the paper also warns of the shortcomings in the current GE implementations and provides recommendations for further developments

Library Resources: Procurement, Innovation and Exploitation in a Digital World

The possibilities of the digital future require new models for procurement, innovation and exploitation. Emma Crowley and Chris Spencer describe the skills staff need to deliver resources in hybrid and digital environments. The chapter demonstrates the innovative ways that librarians use to procure and exploit the wealth of resources available in a digital world. They also describe the technological developments that can be adopted to improve workflow processes and they highlight the challenges faced on this fascinating journey

Access to Core Course Materials Project: Teaching Collection Experiment report

This report documents the third phase in the Access to Core Course Material project, known as the Teaching Collection Experiment. The work began in March 2001 and was completed in September 2001. The Teaching Collection is the name given to the printed reserve at UCL. It contains off-prints of essential course readings that are kept behind issue desks at both the Main and Science Library. Lecturers can place up to five copies of materials in the Collection, which are entered onto the library catalogue and given an unique identifying number. The Experiment investigated the feasibility of digitising a selection of this material and making it available electronically. This report documents the production process and compares the costs and quality of an in-house service with out-sourcing production. This allowed the project team to investigate the feasibility of offering a clearance and/or digitisation service in-house and the costs associated with such activities. The experiment also examined how this service related to the current activities of the Library and might be integrated into existing services. Following on from this experiment, a pilot service known as DigiCOMS was offered to a further 5 departments at UCL. The digitised material produced during the Teaching Collection Experiment was therefore made available through the DigiCOMS service. More details about DigiCOMS are available in a separate report. The Economics Department was selected to participate in this experiment, as they currently use the Teaching Collection to deposit a considerable number of course readings. Using a department from the social sciences also compliments the earlier work for the Dutch Department. It was also important to choose a department whose reading lists contained considerable numbers of published journal articles and chapters from books that required copyright permission from publishers. A selection of material that the department currently deposit in the Teaching Collection was identified, in addition to some material which students had found problematic to get hold of in the past. It should be pointed out at this stage that the distinction between a printed study pack and a teaching collection item in a print environment is significant, in particular for legal reasons, because a set of readings cannot placed within the teaching collection to avoid the copyright costs associated with producing a study pack. However, this distinction is less clear cut once material is made available electronically. Therefore, although the material in the teaching collection did not form a printed study pack, the set of digitised readings are referred to as an electronic study pack. Electronic permissions are also granted by publishers along similar lines to printed study packs, in that the pricing model is based on the length of a particular extract and the number of students on the course

A framework and tool to manage Cloud Computing service quality

Cloud Computing has generated considerable interest in both companies specialized in Information and Communication Technology and business context in general. The Sourcing Capability Maturity Model for service (e-SCM) is a capability model for offshore outsourcing services between clients and providers that offers appropriate strategies to enhance Cloud Computing implementation. It intends to achieve the required quality of service and develop an effective working relationship between clients and providers. Moreover, quality evaluation framework is a framework to control the quality of any product and/or process. It offers a tool support that can generate software artifacts to manage any type of product and service efficiently and effectively. Thus, the aim of this paper was to make this framework and tool support available to manage Cloud Computing service quality between clients and providers by means of e-SCM.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2013-46928-C3-3-RJunta de Andalucía TIC-578

ADAPTING IT SERVICE MANAGEMENT FOR SUCCESSFUL MULTI-SOURCING SERVICE INTEGRATION

Over the last years, IT outsourcing customers have shifted their focus to multi-sourcing. To cope with the ever-increasing complexity of their multi-provider portfolios, companies aim to develop and hone their service integration capabilities. They adapt their IT organizations to enable more efficient and effective service management for their broad service landscapes. Nowadays, most IT service management implementations build on best practice of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). ITIL, however, does neither reflect multi-tenant sourcing models nor end-to-end service integration. IT service management needs to evolve to meet the new requirements of service integration. So far, however, there is a lack of guidance on how to adequately adapt IT service management for integration of multiple sourcing arrangements. Our research contributes to both theory and practice by developing a ranking of IT service management processes according to their importance for service integration success. For three important processes, we then reveal adequate implementations and process designs derived from real-life scenarios. Our results are developed during an multi-stage research study, incorporating insights from expert interviews, a quantitative questionnaire study, and case study research. The insights gained should enable multi-sourcing customers to build more successful service integration solutions, as well as academics to shape future research in this area

Finding scientific articles in a large digital archive: BioStor and the Biodiversity Heritage Library

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a large digital archive of legacy biological literature, comprising over 31 million pages scanned from books, monographs, and journals. During the digitisation process basic metadata about the scanned items is recorded, but not article-level metadata. Given that the article is the standard unit of citation, this makes it difficult to locate cited literature in BHL. Adding the ability to easily find articles in BHL would greatly enhance the value of the archive. A service was developed to locate articles in BHL based on matching article metadata to BHL metadata using approximate string matching, regular expressions, and string alignment. This article finding service is exposed as a standard OpenURL resolver on the BioStor web site "http://biostor.org/openurl/":http://biostor.org/openurl/. This resolver can be used on the web, or called by bibliographic tools that support OpenURL. BioStor provides tools for extracting, annotating, and visualising articles from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. BioStor is available from "http://biostor.org/":http://biostor.org/