Service Quality Assessment with LibQUAL+® in Challenging Times: LibQUAL+® at Cranfield University

Cranfield University is the UK’s only wholly postgraduate university focused on science, technology, engineering, and management. The University Library first implemented the LibQUAL+® survey methodology in 2003 as a member of the Society of College, National, and University Libraries (SCONUL) consortium.1 The successful pilot study was the first time the LibQUAL+® protocol was used outside North America. Since 2005 the survey has been used at Cranfield’s School of Defence and Security annually. Specializing in the teaching of defense science, technology, and management, the student population consists of 1,200 military and civilian students, 85% of whom study part-time away from the university campu

The UK Netball Superleague: A case study of franchising in elite women's sport organisations

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in European Sport Management Quarterly, 12(5), 545 - 567, 2012, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/16184742.2012.734525.This paper draws on theories of franchising in examining the emergence of the UK Netball Superleague (UK NSL) in 2005. The focus of the paper is to explore the development of an empowered franchise framework as part of England Netball's elite performance strategy and the consequences of the Superleague for player performance, team success and commercial potential of the franchises. Twenty-two in-depth interviews conducted between 2008 and 2011 with franchise and sport media/marketing personnel inform the discussion. The paper explains the UK NSL as an empowered franchise model characterised by a shift from the centralised hierarchical model of the business format franchise to one which is decentralised and informal and whereby different franchises are characterised by high degrees of diversity in terms of organisational environment and their own structural characteristics of specialisation and standardisation.The Centre for Sport, Physical Education and Activity Research (SPEAR) at Canterbury Christ Church University

Optimal detection of changepoints with a linear computational cost

We consider the problem of detecting multiple changepoints in large data sets. Our focus is on applications where the number of changepoints will increase as we collect more data: for example in genetics as we analyse larger regions of the genome, or in finance as we observe time-series over longer periods. We consider the common approach of detecting changepoints through minimising a cost function over possible numbers and locations of changepoints. This includes several established procedures for detecting changing points, such as penalised likelihood and minimum description length. We introduce a new method for finding the minimum of such cost functions and hence the optimal number and location of changepoints that has a computational cost which, under mild conditions, is linear in the number of observations. This compares favourably with existing methods for the same problem whose computational cost can be quadratic or even cubic. In simulation studies we show that our new method can be orders of magnitude faster than these alternative exact methods. We also compare with the Binary Segmentation algorithm for identifying changepoints, showing that the exactness of our approach can lead to substantial improvements in the accuracy of the inferred segmentation of the data.Comment: 25 pages, 4 figures, To appear in Journal of the American Statistical Associatio

Delighting Our Customers: Building Services Collaboratively with Learners at a Distance

The Open University (OU) is the largest academic institution dedicated to distance learning in the United Kingdom, with over 173,000 students. Distance learning students can provide a unique perspective on the experience of the library. As the number of students enrolled in distance education courses continues to grow globally there is an increasing opportunity to work with distance students on service design and development. Engaging with distance students can be challenging, but not impossible. Here we will discuss how The Open University Library has utilised a number of methodologies to work in partnership with its students on service design to the benefit of the service and our students. This paper will provide practical value for any library service with a distance learning community. Specific methodologies of successful distance learner engagement will be presented, along with lessons learnt

LibQUAL+®: The SCONUL Experience

LibQUAL+® is a library customer satisfaction survey developed by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) in association with Texas A&M University (Association of Research Libraries, 2011). The survey consists of 22 questions on library services across three dimensions: Affect of Service, containing questions relating to the library staff; Information Control, covering the library resources and access to them; and Library as Place, assessing the physical environment. One of the key strengths of LibQUAL+® is its use of gap theory to evaluate customer expectations as well as perceptions. For each of the 22 questions respondents are asked their minimum and desired expectations along with their current perceived level of service on a nine-point scoring scale. The standardised survey enables participating institutions to benchmark their scores against one another, and against an aggregated score for their consortium

Medieval property investors, ca. 1300-1500

This paper utilises a dataset of freehold land and property transactions from medieval England to highlight the growing commercialisation of the economy. By drawing on the legal records we are able to demonstrate that the medieval real estate market provided the opportunity for investors to profit. Careful analysis of the data provides evidence of group purchases, multiple transactions and investors buying outside of their own locality. The identification of these ‘investors’ and their buying behaviours, set within the context of the English medieval economy, contributes to the early commercialisation debate