Market orientation: a concept for health libraries

OBJECTIVES: This paper is the result of exploratory research forming part of ongoing study into the value and relevance of market orientation as a strategic option for library managers. The aim of the study is to gain an understanding of the concept of market orientation relative to the health library sector. METHODOLOGY: A focus group was used to gather data from health librarians working at different levels in the sector. The data was coded and categorized by an expert panel and analysed using a taxonomic map developed during the study. RESULTS: Health library professionals define and understand market orientation in the same way as the concept is defined in the management literature. Their understanding of the concept is developing. A greater emphasis is given to some aspects of market orientation than others. CONCLUSIONS: There are implications for further research. Methods used to measure market orientation in other domains are likely to be relevant for libraries. Research should be extended to different sectors to explore any cross-sector differences. Fostering an organizational culture that supports market orientation has implications for service management and development.     

The Middle East Books Market: a Personal Overview

A concise review is presented of the essential elements of the book publishing and bookselling business in a complex and diverse market. Demographics create the diversity while Arabic is the one language spoken across a multitude of different countries. Three features are common to all of these countries and they are: the dominance of English as the second language, education has and will remain to be a priority, and economic pressures cause price sensitivity to be a major challenge especially in the educational market segments. It is the price sensitivity as a key factor for the lack of respect for intellectual property and copyright regulations. A review of distribution and retail stores is a very important topic in relation to this complex collection of countries. The emergence of e-books is discussed especially in the educational, professional and reference market segments. Finally, there is a review of the Arabic language publishers and local book fairs to bring this article to closure.     

Finding related sentence pairs in MEDLINE

We explore the feasibility of automatically identifying sentences in different MEDLINE abstracts that are related in meaning. We compared traditional vector space models with machine learning methods for detecting relatedness, and found that machine learning was superior. The Huber method, a variant of Support Vector Machines which minimizes the modified Huber loss function, achieves 73% precision when the score cutoff is set high enough to identify about one related sentence per abstract on average. We illustrate how an abstract viewed in PubMed might be modified to present the related sentences found in other abstracts by this automatic procedure.     

Book Distribution in the Arab World

Business opportunities in international markets are largely determined by accessibility, transparency, and legal frameworks fair to all parties concerned. Arab book markets in principle offer a tremendous potential with more than 300 million readers sharing one common language. Besides unsolved censorship issues, problems with money collection, and differing regulations, however, the lack of a uniform book distribution system is the most critical hurdle for the development of a common Arabic book market. Most importantly, there is no comprehensive database containing accurate content briefs, background information on authors, ISBN numbers, and publisher company information as well as all relevant commercial data such as book prices, weight, logistics terms, and availability. Authors and publishers are hard hit as they often need to organize book transportation, delivery, and invoice collection on their own. At present, “selling book fairs” in the Arab world—with the exception of Abu Dhabi International Book Fair—present themselves as crowded book bazaars rather than executive meeting points. The authors of the article, however, are anticipating change: New distribution initiatives will soon interlink regional Arabic markets and create unique growth and profit opportunities.     

A Look at Global Expansion for e-Books

Forecasts indicate a growing demand for digital content around the world. Converting to digital content can open up countless new revenue possibilities. Adding alternate channels may be worth consideration, but what are the options and what does it take to utilize them effectively? This article explores the opportunities that potentially exist for publishers with content that may be digitized and distributed to global markets. A brief review of the current marketplace is also incorporated, including current players and trends. Finally, an analysis of some of the potential issues, challenges and pitfalls is presented in context of delving into a new international digital content distribution strategy.     

Learning to rank with (a lot of) word features

In this article we present Supervised Semantic Indexing which defines a class of nonlinear (quadratic) models that are discriminatively trained to directly map from the word content in a query-document or document-document pair to a ranking score. Like Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), our models take account of correlations between words (synonymy, polysemy). However, unlike LSI our models are trained from a supervised signal directly on the ranking task of interest, which we argue is the reason for our superior results. As the query and target texts are modeled separately, our approach is easily generalized to different retrieval tasks, such as cross-language retrieval or online advertising placement. Dealing with models on all pairs of words features is computationally challenging. We propose several improvements to our basic model for addressing this issue, including low rank (but diagonal preserving) representations, correlated feature hashing and sparsification. We provide an empirical study of all these methods on retrieval tasks based on Wikipedia documents as well as an Internet advertisement task. We obtain state-of-the-art performance while providing realistically scalable methods.     

Experiences of teachers and trainee teachers who are dyslexic

In the current climate of inclusion, an important issue involves the inclusion of teachers with a range of disabilities. The Dyslexia in Higher Education Report raised concerns about the negative attitude of some teacher training departments to admitting and supporting students with dyslexia. This study interviewed a small number of practising teachers and trainee teachers with dyslexia about their experiences of teaching and training and the specific coping strategies they adopted in the classroom. They were all asked if (and how) their own experiences of literacy difficulties had influenced the way they taught children, and especially those with literacy difficulties. All the participants reported using a number of effective coping strategies and felt on balance the advantages of being dyslexic outweighed the disadvantages in terms of giving them greater empathy and understanding of children's problems. The majority felt their own very negative experiences of school had been a strong motivating factor in wanting to teach in order to give children a better educational experience than their own. Trainee and newly qualified teachers were fearful of being ‘found out’ by other members of staff and often felt low in confidence despite performing well in the classroom. Most would have welcomed constructive support and mentoring from experienced teachers with dyslexia. In a supposedly inclusive education culture, it is argued that a more enabling and open attitude to teachers with dyslexia should be adopted