PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES AND TRAINING NEEDS OF COLLEGE LIBRARIANS IN KHYBER PAKHTUNKHWA

Purpose of study: The core aim of the study is to identify the level of professional activities and training needs of library practitioners serving in Government colleges of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. Research Method and Procedure: This study is quantitative, and the survey method is applied to achieve the desired objectives. The public sector college librarians of seven districts of the southern region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa were the study population. Data Collection and analysis: A structured questionnaire was distributed among fifty-nine (59) college librarians. Out of total, fifty-five (55) librarians return the filled questionnaire with a response rate of 93%. Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) Version 21 is used to analyze the collected data. Major Findings and Recommendations: it was reflected that sixty- four percent of the respondents had not attended any training program in the last five years. The main reason for not attending the training program is the lack of management support with library professionals. Only thirty-six percent of the college librarians had attended conferences, workshops, seminars, and webinars organized by academic libraries, training institutes and universitie

Information technology and cost efficiency in Malaysian banking industry

It is argued that information technology can increase cost efficiency of banks by offering opportunities to substitute across inputs into production – for example, to substitute computer technology and information networks for labor. Hence, the transition to a knowledge-based financial sector would lead to banks becoming more competitive, more cost effective and better able in managing risks. As such, those banks that failed to make this transition are less able to compete as they lack the capability to innovate and face higher delivery costs. The main objectives of this paper are to determine the impact of IT on banking efficiency and its economies of scale using a sample of Malaysian banks. To achieve these objectives, stochastic cost frontier method is employed to estimate bank efficiency and panel data approach were used to examine the impact of IT on bank efficiency. The results indicate that the impact of IT on bank efficiency increases with increase in bank size, hence further supporting the process of bank mergers that are currently undertaken in the Malaysian banking industry

Library Leaders’ Attitude towards User Care in University Libraries of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Islamabad

The goal of this research was to look at the attitudes of library leaders’ towards user care in university libraries of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Islamabad. This study was conducted utilizing a quantitative research methodology that included a survey approach and a questionnaire. The data were collected from all library leaders’ working in the universities/ degree awarding institutions of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Islamabad recognized by Higher Education Commission of Pakistan. Both descriptive as wells as inferential statistics were applied to analyze data using SPSS. The results revealed that the library leaders had an overall positive attitude towards user care. There were no statistically significant differences in the library leaders’ attitude based on types of university, number of employees in libraries, year of establishment of university, library working days in a week, and library timing respectively. Conversely, there were statistically significant mean differences in library leaders’ attitude towards user care based on geographical locations of university and gender of the respondents. The results provided a pragmatic insight into the user-centred approaches for managing customer (user) relationship for marketing of library resources and services. This research also had an important contribution to the existing literature on relationship marketing in general and user relationship management in particular as only a few such studies appeared so far

Shining a light on nursing art in Pakistan

Nursing is considered both science and art. Artful nursing has been essential for holistic nursing practice since the time of Nightingale, but it is getting neglected and has been lately limited to nursing literature (Gramling, 2004). This qualitative study seeks to gain an understanding of the perceptions of active nurses in Pakistan about nursing art and yields four major themes: artful nursing is embedded in humane responsiveness, artful nursing has healing power, artful nursing is a satisfying experience, and artful nursing is invisible in nursing practice. Study participants valued nursing art, and their perceptions illuminate Watson\u27s Theory of Human Caring (1988)

Do young inspire to be an entrepreneur? A case of secondary students perception in Malaysia

Youth plays an important role in the nation development.They were the future leader and development partners that drives towards the development of the nations. The ability to harness their potential as entrepreneur will helps to determine the nation strength and resilience in pursuing social, economic and political development.Therefore, providing proper environment and opportunities will be essential to inspire youth in becoming an entrepreneur.This paper will look into factors affecting youth intention (with target group of secondary school pupil in Malaysia) of becoming entrepreneur.The finding indicates that only 144 students from a sample of 1011 secondary students in Malaysia have interest to engage in entrepreneurship upon completion of schooling although various approaches have been made to increase youths participating in entrepreneurship.This study also suggested with recommendations to enhance and review existing curriculum entrepreneurship education for improve youth intention of becoming entrepreneur

Smart sensing-enabled decision support system for water scheduling in orange orchard

The scarcity of water resources throughout the world demands its optimum utilization in various sectors. Smart Sensing-enabled irrigation management systems are the ideal solutions to ensure the optimum utilization of water resources in the agriculture sector. This paper presents a wireless sensor network-enabled Decision Support System (DSS) for developing a need-based irrigation schedule for the orange orchard. For efficient monitoring of various in-field parameters, our proposed approach uses the latest smart sensing technology such as soil moisture, leaf-wetness, temperature and humidity. The proposed smart sensing-enabled test-bed was deployed in the orange orchard of our institute for approximately one year and successfully adjusted its irrigation schedule according to the needs and demands of the plants. Moreover, a modified Longest Common SubSequence (LCSS) mechanism is integrated with the proposed DSS for distinguishing multi-valued noise from the abrupt changing scenarios. To resolve the concurrent communication problem of two or more wasp-mote sensor boards with a common receiver, an enhanced RTS/CTS handshake mechanism is presented. Our proposed DSS compares the most recently refined data with pre-defined threshold values for efficient water management in the orchard. Irrigation activity is scheduled if water deficit criterion is met and the farmer is informed accordingly. Both the experimental and simulation results show that the proposed scheme performs better in comparison to the existing schemes. © 2001-2012 IEEE

Information tehnology and cost efficiency in Malaysian banking industry

It is argued that information technology can increase cost efficiency of banks by offering opportunities to substitute across inputs into production – for example, to substitute computer technology and information networks for labor. Hence, the transition to a knowledge-based financial sector would lead to banks becoming more competitive, more cost effective and better able in managing risks. As such, those banks that failed to make this transition are less able to compete as they lack the capability to innovate and face higher delivery costs. The main objectives of this paper are to determine the impact of IT on banking efficiency and its economies of scale using a sample of Malaysian banks. To achieve these objectives, stochastic cost frontier method is employed to estimate bank efficiency and panel data approach were used to examine the impact of IT on bank efficiency. The results indicate that the impact of IT on bank efficiency increases with increase in bank size, hence further supporting the process of bank mergers that are currently undertaken in the Malaysian banking industry

Flood victims’ evacuation decisions: a semi -nonparametric estimation

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyse the determinants of actual evacuation decisions of victims of the unprecedented 2014 year-end flood disaster which wreaked havoc across two east-coast states in Malaysia.Design/methodology/approach: The target population of this study is the group of victims affected by the December 2014 flood in the Malaysian east-coast states of Kelantan and Pahang. Sampling frames of the flood victims were obtained from the National Security Council offices of the two states. The empirical analysis of this paper is based on a unique data set obtained from a questionnaire survey of the flood victims. The final working sample consists of 372 respondents.Findings: Important findings from this study are: victims who were given evacuation notices were five times more likely to evacuate, victims who participated in flood awareness programmes were less likely to move to evacuation centres, the further away victims’ homes were from the evacuation centres the more likely they were to evacuate, older victims were less likely to evacuate, larger households were more likely to evacuate, and victims with tertiary education were also less likely to evacuate.Originality/value: This paper is unique because previous studies of Malaysian flood-related disasters are confined to floods of regular magnitude. This paper is also unique because it uses a semi-parametric estimation approach to obtain the marginal effects of the explanatory variables on evacuation decisions

Malaysia’s 2014 unprecedented flood catastrophe: A semiparametric estimation of evacuation decisions

In December 2014, Malaysia experienced its worst unprecedented flood catastrophe.This paper looks at the victims’ evacuation decisions of that flood. This paper is unique because previous papers on Malaysian flood-related disasters are only confined to floods of regular or typical scales.This paper is also unique because it uses a semiparametric estimation approach to obtain the marginal impact of the variables of interest on evacuation decisions.This way, there are less distributional assumptions on the error term, and the estimation results would be more robust. Among some of the important findings from the estimations, we find that: (i) victims who have participated in flood awareness programmes are less likely to evacuate to evacuation centres, (ii) victims who are instructed to evacuate are 5 times likelier to do so, (iii) victims with tertiary education are also less likely to evacuate, (iv) larger households are likelier to evacuate, and (v) the further away victims’ homes are from the evacuation centres the likelier they are to evacuate.These findings, some which may seem counterintuitive, are discussed in the conclusion and policy implication section of the paper