A web survey is a cost-effective and efficient method to use when measuring the characteristics of an audience and developing or testing new product concepts. This paper reports on the use of a web survey by a start-up media/internet firm, Farmers' Almanac TV. The results indicate that using email to contact respondents from a client list results…

OECD's Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) has worked on Open Educational Resources (OER) in the past, which led to the publication "Giving Knowledge for Free--the Emergence of Open Educational Resources" (2007). This working paper thus builds on exploratory and forward-looking research in CERI and invites countries to consider…

In response to a request of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, public universities and community, technical, and state colleges in Texas were asked to provide examples of efficiencies implemented on their campuses between Fiscal Year (FY) 2001 and FY 2003. For purposes of this request, an efficiency was defined as an activity that…

In fiscal year 1995, about 26 million students in about 94,000 schools nationwide were served lunches each day through the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). In response to concerns raised about the amount of food thrown away by students (called plate waste), the General Accounting Office (GAO) surveyed a random sample of cafeteria managers in…

A survey of interlibrary loan (ILL) staffing levels in Michigan academic libraries was conducted in 1994 to examine the relationship between ILL transaction volume and staffing patterns. Results show that departments with the largest volume needed additional staff; inadequate staffing levels caused blurring of job descriptions; and that ILL staff…

A dramatic increase in interlibrary loan (ILL) in academic and research libraries in the last five years, combined with a changing office environment, is forcing reassessment of the relationship between the volume and cost of loans to service quality. In the spring of 1988, a survey was sent to 116 member libraries of the Association of Research…

This report describes a study designed to evaluate and compare the provision of National Technical Information Service (NTIS) documents to users of the McKinney Engineering Library at the University of Texas through Selected Research in Microfiche (SRIM), a standing-order, collection-building service, with the provision of documents through…

An efficiency study was conducted of the sampling design used for the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 (NLS), and the change variables used in the first followup. Nine alternative designs were compared, using a cost model based upon the number of schools and students sampled. Fourteen change variables and eight domains…

Two major areas of concern to vocational education are cost benefit and job and task analysis. In recent years vocational education has broadened its outlook in terms of general human development, but the historical context of vocational education and concerns for accountability require evaluation of vocational education programs to consider cost…

The first part of this paper discusses two principal forms elaborated upon in previous literature for describing the relation between per pupil operating costs and school enrollment size. The first of these forms indicates that average per pupil costs decline up to a point as enrollment increases, reach a minimum, and then rise with further school…