The Impact of RDS on Usage of Electronic Content in UK Academic Libraries: Selected Results from a UKSG-Funded Project

Resource discovery services (RDS), also called web-scale discovery services (WDS), have attracted considerable attention in recent years. This article aims to provide an environmental scan of the adoption of RDS in UK higher education libraries and provide an analysis of RDS resource usage data to gauge whether RDS have an impact on the overall usage of ejournals and ebooks. Findings show that there appears to be a positive impact in most cases, although the extent of this impact varies across libraries and publishers. There is undeniably a degree of complexity in the usage analysis owing to the multidimensional nature of the environment.     

The effect of fragmentation on the threatened plant community Coastal Moonah Woodland in Victoria,Australia

Coastal vegetation is under increasing pressure with the expansion of urban developments, tourism, population and changing climates. This study sought to examine the effects of fragmentation on the threatened plant community, Coastal Moonah Woodland, in southern Victoria, Australia. We examined the effects on community composition of surrounding land use (urban, rural, native vegetation), remnant size and environmental attributes at three spatial scales. At larger scales, geographic and environmental attributes, such as annual rainfall and temperature, were important drivers of community composition. At finer scales, remnant size, disturbance, weed invasion, connectivity, and immediate surrounding land use impacted more on community composition. At these scales, increasing native vegetation cover in the landscape, remnant connectivity and size positively influenced community composition. If coastal development continues at the current rate, all but a few remnants of this community will be surrounded by the urban landscape. Thus, planning for the integration of these remnants in the urban landscape through long-term management plans and community involvement is essential for the survival of these remnants.     

The value relevance of accounting:: The rest of the story

When a story appears in the media reporting ‘restatements, frauds, and investigations,' how do reported dollar effects relate to value? Declines to about half the pre-event levels are observed, even when the overall market has been increasing significantly. The declines in price (cum dividend) are significantly associated with the amount of the event's effect, as reported in the media, when concurrently controlling for earnings, industry, market, and scalar (book value) effects. The Value Line evaluations of these companies' safety, financial strength, price stability, and technical ranking all deteriorate significantly post-event. Managers evaluating their accounting and controls should consider such consequences.     

Diagnostic tests for bias of estimating equations in weighted regression with missing covariates

The authors propose two tests, one parametric and the other semiparametric, for testing bias of estimating equations in weighted regression with partially missing covariates when the primary regression model is correctly specified. More generally, the proposed tests may be thought of as a diagnostic tool for the combined package of the primary regression model and the missingness assumptions. The asymptotic null distributions of the two test statistics are derived under the assumption of missingness at random for the partially missing covariates. A small scale simulation study completes the work.     

Social Quality: A Way to Measure the Quality of Society

In this paper we suggest a way to measure the well-being of society based upon our own development of the Social Quality model. The Social Quality model has the advantage of being sociologically grounded as a measure of the well-being of society and the individuals within it. We test our model of Social Quality against life satisfaction as an indicator of how successful it is in delivering these aspirations. The model was tested on all European countries using the European Quality of Life Surveys in 2003 and 2007 and was found to explain a large amount of variance, which was consistent across time and space. We suggest that it is possible to operationalise this model using small number of variables, ones that are frequently used in comparative surveys and this should enable the quality of society to be measured in a parsimonious and effective way.