Explaining Post-War Cinema Attendance in Great Britain

This paper models the interaction between cinema admissions and cinema supply in response to changes in exogenous variables, chiefly competition from television viewing. The relationship is estimated empirically by applying near Vector Autoregression (VAR) techniques to a long run of British annual data from 1950 to 1997. The results indicate that sustained negative shocks to cinema demand throughout most of the period reduced the supply of screens, inducing further falls in admissions and closures until a new equilibrium was attained. More recently, the introduction of multiplex cinemas has interrupted and partially reversed this downward demand-supply spiral.     

The British Columbia Open Learning Agency

This article discusses the formation and development of the British Columbia Open Learning Agency and summarizes the principal features of its current activities in providing open learning opportunities in the fields of adult basic education, technical‐vocational training and undergraduate degree programmes.     

Auditing the historic environment: Measurements,datasets and English heritage's state of the historic environment report 2002

This chapter sets out the current context for historic environment management, and the associated information requirements to manage organisations successfully within the sector for the benefit of the country's heritage. The initiative undertaken by English Heritage (the English government's conservation advisors) in developing a pilot State of the Historic Environment Report is used as a case study in the collation of management information for advocacy purposes. Political support for such a development is considered, as well as the history of the report's development with its roots outside the heritage sector. The challenges of project management for report delivery are discussed, particularly where information collation and analysis is reliant on third‐party data sources, often created for separate purposes. Tourism data is focused on, showing how results from the former English Tourism Council's annual surveys of visitor attractions were used to inform key messages in the heritage sector. Comments are made on specific types of data used, and a review given of the methodology for collecting dedicated heritage management organisational data.     

Response time variations in an online search system.

The response time characteristics of the National Library of Medicine's (NLM) ELHILL bibliographic search system are examined in this article. Transactions for a five-week period are analyzed and average response times are calculated for typical search commands, by time of day, and by file being searched. Overall, the response time of the system was found to be 2.1 seconds, a very low value. Based on statistical tests of significance applied to the data, it was concluded that response time differences can be explained in terms of the number of users on the system and not the command issued by the user nor the file the user searched.