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.     

Letter to the Editor

In this paper we note some of the problems surrounding the conflicted issue of social work student placements. We argue that, although on an espoused level fieldwork is considered to be at the ‘core’ of social work education, there appears to be increasing difficulty in acquiring suitable and sufficient fieldwork placements. The extent of this difficulty suggests the existence of a contradiction between espoused views about social work education and the reality. We suggest that this contradiction cannot simply be explained in terms of the pressures on individual agencies or fieldwork teachers, but rather symbolises an ongoing power struggle (at a covert level) over who, or which interest groups, are to control the practice of social work. We conclude by advocating the need to debate the issues raised in our paper in open forum.     

Do flow principles of operations management apply to computing centres?

By analysing large data-sets on jobs processed in major computing centres, we study how operations management principles apply to these modern day processing plants. We show that Little’s Law on long-term performance averages holds to computing centres, i.e. work-in-progress equals throughput rate multiplied by process lead time. Contrary to traditional manufacturing principles, the law of variation does not hold to computing centres, as the more variation in job lead times the better the throughput and utilisation of the system. We also show that as the utilisation of the system increases lead times and work-in-progress increase, which complies with traditional manufacturing. In comparison with current computing centre operations these results imply that better allocation of jobs could increase throughput and utilisation, while less computing resources are needed, thus increasing the overall efficiency of the centre. From a theoretical point of view, in a system with close to zero set-up times, as in the case of computing centres, the law of variation does not hold. We observe that the more variation in job lead times and resource usage, the higher the throughput of the system.     

Gambling in prison: addiction or leisure activity?

Several studies conducted around the world confirm the presence of gambling in detention facilities. Based on interviews conducted with male inmates in three Canadian penitentiaries, the authors of this article studied the reasons to gamble or not gamble in detention. The inmates' relationships with gambling prior to their incarceration were taken into consideration, to explain notably the influence of context on the reasons why they do or do not gamble. For most inmates, gambling is a good recreational alternative to boredom; however, some use it also to socialize or even protect themselves indirectly. Even more interesting is the fact that, despite the presence of gambling addicts among the inmates interviewed, none of the reasons generally associated with pathological gambling was reported during the interviews to explain gambling in detention. These results reinforce the influence of contextual factors on pathological gambling problems. Anxiety-producing factors in gamblers' lives, an environment where gambling is too accessible, as well as solitary habits, are conducive to addiction. By reducing stressful elements, as well as the availability, variety and special effects of gambling games, prison would indirectly control inmates' compulsive gambling habits during their incarceration.     

The sense of violence and the absence of consolation

The paper is an attempt to engage with our contemplations of violence and the failure of familiar explanations to capture these contemplations. We begin our explorations of these familiar accounts by examining contemporary debates on media violence but find these problematic. By reducing media violence to mere spectacle or, on the contrary, by seeing such violence as desensitising and destructive, the various positions in the debates deprive violence of meaning and fail to address our fascination with violence. Other explanations that seek to attach meaning or utility to violence, be it economic, symbolic or moral, equally fail to convince. There is always an excess that transcends these explanations, an excess that is ill-captured by the notion of ‘gratuitous violence’ often deployed to condemn violence that does not make sense. Furthermore, the various accounts of violence we review tend to consider violence only in terms of its victims and perpetrators rather than the (fortunately) more common position of the observer. In the remaining of the paper, we try to say something about the sense of violence without investing it with deterministic or moralistic implications. This leads us to re-interpret the notion of desensitisation; for the observer, desensitisation indexes a lack of sensation of violence. This lack of sensation, our inability as observers to sense and make sense of violence, we argue, brings about moral questioning and acuity rather than moral indifference.