Back in the 1990s, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems may not have been user-friendly, but what they tried to do was totally reasonable: replace stand-alone systems in various departments--such as finance, logistics, and human resources--with a single integrated software program. The idea was that although each department would still have…

This article presents an analysis of a short customer-vendor dialogue between a German couple and a Polish vendor at a food bazaar on the Polish border with Germany. In this situation, interactants have to negotiate and construct framings of hospitality abroad, customer-vendor relations, as well as intercultural relations. It is assumed that…

Use of external vendors to implement school reform and address student achievement in urban secondary schools has not been studied. This quasi-experimental longitudinal study focused on changes in student achievement among urban 9th grade students during the 2010-2011 school year. The theoretical framework was the transformational model of using…

Resource constrained microcontrollers with as little as several hundred bytes of RAM and a few dozen megahertz of processing power are the most prevalent computing devices on earth. Microcontrollers and the many application components that interface to them, such as sensors, actuators, transceivers and displays are now cheap and readily available.…

It is a typical day at the famous fish market in Bergen, Norway. Vendors wrapped in rain coats huddle under white tents, selling everything from shrimp to flowers to handmade souvenirs. Some tables are stacked with salmon and herring, while others feature baskets of berries and fresh fruits. Families out for their household grocery shopping are…

In the context of a diverse, multi-campus university, this study discusses historical factors and recent changes in scholarly communication and the economic impact of these changes as we seek to forge stronger cooperation among our campuses. After consulting literature, the authors found that issues relating to acquisitions of multi-campus…

In October 2012, Microsoft will release the commercial version of its next operating system, presently called "Windows 8." This version represents a significant departure from the past. Microsoft wants this operating system to meet user needs regardless of physical platform (e.g., desktop, notebook, tablet, mobile phone). As part of this mission,…

With faculty balking at the price of academic journals, can other digital publishing options get traction? University libraries are no strangers to one of the most popular online alternatives, the open-access archive. These archives enable scholars to upload work--including drafts of articles that are published later in subscription journals--so…

Software pricing is not a straightforward issue, since each procurement involves a special business arrangement between a library and its chosen vendor. The author thinks that it is reasonable to scale the cost of a product to such factors as the size of the library, the complexity of the installation, the number of simultaneous users, or the…

When the author went to the Frankfurt Book Fair in mid-October in search of an ebooks update story, he learned from vendors that, in a decade-long struggle to grasp a foothold, ebooks are finally coming of age in libraries of all kinds. Though ebook's past may have been one of false hopes and nonstarts, according to all accounts, it was the…

Often organized as grassroots, nonprofit organizations, many farmers' markets serve as strategic venues linking producers and consumers of local food while fulfilling multiple social, economic, and environmental objectives. This article examines the potential of farmers' markets to play a catalyst role in linking local food systems to the social…

The shift from traditional print materials to electronic resources, in conjunction with the rise in the number of distance education programs, has left many electronic resource librarians scrambling to keep up with the resulting inundation of electronic resource problems. When it comes to diagnosing these problems, words do not always convey all…

Content is both a key ingredient for business and a major expense. Market research shows that the investment in content and data is generally one of the top expense items within a firm. For some firms, within the financial industry, for example, content costs are the second or third level of expense behind the cost of employees. While there has…

The year 2011 was the PALNI (Private Academic Library Network of Indiana) consortium's "rookie season" for the implementation of Primo, the 2010 Discovery Layer 500 race winner. In this article, the authors report on their transition to the cloud within Ex Libris Ltd.'s Primo TotalCare environment: their preparation, the steps involved…

On May 10, 1968, the Cannes Film Festival shuddered to a stop when filmmakers including Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut rushed the stage at the Palais des Festivals to protest French New Waver Henri Langlois's removal from his post as president of the National Cinematheque Francaise. Also that month, in that same spirit of film lovers'…