A PASport to Service Quality

Part 1 of this article discussed the current service quality environment in which academic libraries find themselves operating, and the challenge for staff performance assessment as an integral element of maintaining and improving effective service quality levels. As referenced in Part 1, Millson-Martula and Menon in a 1999 article in College and Research Libraries suggest that no effort to enhance customer satisfaction will succeed unless students and faculty are convinced that library staff, as service providers, care about the quality of service they provide and the manner in which they do it. However, library staff will not demonstrate a high degree of commitment and caring unless they believe that library management cares about the staff as well. Simply put, customer satisfaction equals employee satisfaction. [Millson-Martula and Menon, p.46]. It is difficult to separate employee satisfaction from appropriate performance assessment. But this performance appraisal must be found in the context of a larger effort which includes staff interpersonal understanding (connection), service evaluation, personal and professional development opportunities, and appropriate recognition. Without those, performance assessment alone could appear to be punitive. It is in this broader context that the performance assessment system, PASport, was developed at the Centennial Library

How do Early Years Educators sustain and define their professionalism? A methodological approach to eliciting early years educators’ thinking

This research has been concerned with eliciting the voices and thinking of a group of early years’ educators across three Local Education Authorities in West Yorkshire. The early years of education require a reflective, articulate and highly qualified workforce. The ability to reflect on and evaluate practice, prescription and one’s own thoughts about it must be the key to professionalism in the early years. The objective of this research was to extrapolate the thinking of a small group of EYEs across three local education authorities (LEAs) in West Yorkshire. The methodology of eliciting teacher thinking was employed to gain access to their voices and discover what were their critical issues and interests, their professional and practical knowledge. Rather than directing the participants to responding to specific aspects, the research was conducted to enable them to demonstrate any areas of interest and critical issues arising from their professional roles.Teacher thinking’ is an effective methodology to determine the thinking and knowledge of experienced and complex professionals working in a variety of settings. This empirical research was undertaken to elicit educators' perspectives to determine their own understandings, with accounts in their own terms through in-depth open-ended interviews, questionnaires, personal/professional time-lines, video-reflective interviews on practice and focus group interviews. These varied different data collection strategies are key to the research as they elicited holistic and varied perspectives on the early years educators professionalism. The aim was to give early years educators a voice, promote recognition of the complexity of the phenomena to be studied and determine the most effective method of eliciting their thinking. This article presents the methodology and findings from this research

Valuing biodiversity from an economic perspective : a unified economic, ecological and genetic approach

biodiversionoptimization;ecology

Regulating nonlinear environmental systems under Knightian uncertainty

uncertainty;environment;regulations

Why can't every year be a National Year of Reading? An evaluation of the NYR in Yorkshire

An evaluation of the National Year of Reading in Yorkshire was conducted by Leeds Metropolitan University in response to a brief from Museums, Libraries and Archives, Yorkshire. This paper outlines the development and planning of phase one of this small scale qualitative research project and the analysis of the initial results which looks at the impact of NYR on the organisations that delivered the campaign and their work with target groups. The Generic Social Outcomes and the National Indicators were used to develop a theoretical framework. Data were gathered via in depth interviews and focus groups with NYR steering group partners in Calderdale and North Lincolnshire, selected as the two case study authorities. The use of MAXQDA computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) enabled data and coding structures to be stored and will facilitate comparison in this longitudinal study. This evaluation will provide material that local library authorities can use for advocacy with a range of audiences including local and central government

A Dynamic Structural Model for Stock Return Volatility and Trading Volume

This paper seeks to develop a structural model that lets data on asset returns and trading volume speak to whether volatility autocorrelation comes from the fundamental that the trading process is pricing or, is caused by the trading process itself. Returns and volume data argue, in the context of our model, that persistent volatility is caused by traders experimenting with different beliefs based upon past profit experience and their estimates of future profit experience. A major theme of our paper is to introduce adaptive agents in the spirit of Sargent (1993) but have them adapt their strategies on a time scale that is slower than the time scale on which the trading process takes place. This will lead to positive autocorrelation in volatility and volume on the time scale of the trading process which generates returns and volume data. Positive autocorrelation of volatility and volume is caused by persistence of strategy patterns that are associated with high volatility and high volume. Thee following features seen in the data: (i) The autocorrelation function of a measure of volatility such as squared returns or absolute value of returns is positive with a slowly decaying tail. (ii) The autocorrelation function of a measure of trading activity such as volume or turnover is positive with a slowly decaying tail. (iii) The cross correlation function of a measure of volatility such as squared returns is about zero for squared returns with past and future volumes and is positive for squared returns with current volumes. (iv) Abrupt changes in prices and returns occur which are hard to attach to 'news.' The last feature is obtained by a version of the model where the Law of Large Numbers fails in the large economy limit.

Discrete Choice with Social Interactions I: Theory

This paper provides an analysis of aggregate behavioral outcomes when individual utility exhibits social interaction effects. We study generalized logistic models of individual choice which incorporate terms reflecting the desire of individuals to conform to the behavior of others in an environment of noncooperative decisionmaking. Laws of large numbers are generated in such environments. Multiplicity of equilibria in these models, which are equivalent to the existence of multiple self-consistent means for average choice behavior, will exist when the social interactions exceed a particular threshold. Local stability of these multiple equilibria is also studied. The properties of the noncooperative economy are contrasted with the properties of an economy in which a social planner determines the set of individual choices. The model is additionally shown to be well suited to explaining a number of empirical phenomena, such as threshold effects in individual behavior, ethnic group fixed effects of income equations, and large cross-group differences in binary choice behavior.

Quick X-ray Reflectivity using Monochromatic Synchrotron Radiation for Time-Resolved Applications

We describe and demonstrate a new technique for parallel collection of x-ray reflectivity data, compatible with monochromatic synchrotron radiation and flat substrates, and apply it to the in-situ observation of thin-film growth. The method employs a polycapillary x-ray optic to produce a converging fan of radiation incident onto a sample surface, and an area detector to simultaneously collect the XRR signal over an angular range matching that of the incident fan. Factors determining the range and instrumental resolution of the technique in reciprocal space, in addition to the signal-to-background ratio, are described in detail. Our particular implementation records $\sim$5\degree{} in $2\theta$ and resolves Kiessig fringes from samples with layer thicknesses ranging from 3 to 76 nm. Finally, we illustrate the value of this approach by showing in-situ XRR data obtained with 100 ms time resolution during the growth of epitaxial \ce{La_{0.7}Sr_{0.3}MnO3} on \ce{SrTiO3} by Pulsed Laser Deposition (PLD) at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS). Compared to prior methods for parallel XRR data collection, ours is the first method that is both sample-independent and compatible with highly collimated, monochromatic radiation typical of 3rd generation synchrotron sources. Further, our technique can be readily adapted for use with laboratory-based sources.Comment: Accepted in Journal of Synchrotron Radiatio