Using Consumer Data to Illustrate How the Library Channel Drives Digital Sales

The library channel is often underappreciated as a key part of a publisher’s business strategy. In an age where publishers are constantly seeking new revenue and marketing opportunities, presence in the library—digitally—can yield significant growth. This paper examines the library channel, its business model based on library lending, the performance of eBooks and audiobooks across all subjects, and consumer reading behavior. Digital Book Clubs, a relatively new phenomenon, are also defined and illustrated with examples demonstrating the library’s valuable role in increasing discoverability and ultimately sales.     

Social media use in the career development of graduate students: the mediating role of internship effectiveness and the moderating role of Zhongyong

This paper proves that social media use can contribute in important ways to employability outcomes. Specifically, results from a survey of 196 recent graduate students in China indicate that social media use is positively related to employability skills. Internship effectiveness serve as a mediating mechanism through which social media use affects employability skills. Zhongyong has a moderating effect on the social media use-internship effectiveness relationship. In addition to the direct moderating effect, Zhongyong is found to moderate the indirect relationship between social media use and employability skills. We discuss implications of these results for research and practice.     

Educational leadership and pupil achievement in primary education

Educational leadership can be defined as the ability of a principal to initiate school improvement, to create a learning-oriented educational climate, and to stimulate and supervise teachers in such a way that the latter may execute their tasks as effectively as possible. In 1989, 1993, and 1998, teacher perceptions of educational leadership of principals in Dutch elementary education were evaluated by means of a Rasch-scale. It turned out that the educational leadership of Dutch principals has grown considerably. In both 1989 and 1993 the effect of educational leadership on pupil achievement was investigated. While in 1989 no significant relationship was found, the results of 1993 show a significant relationship between educational leadership and average pupil achievement over 3 successive years corrected for school environment.     

Tool Support for Teaching the Personal Software Process

Software engineering education can be viewed as a challenging task. Computer science students tend to focus on the programming aspects of a project, and take a “hacking approach” to completing a project, rather than viewing the process. Our course material includes teaching the Personal Software Process (PSP). Students are required to produce defect and effort metrics, as well as project summary reports. Tools to assist information recording and production of reports are difficult for students to access. The cost in terms of financial and learning time is usually too high at the educational level to justify using commercial tools that are available for the professional software engineer. We have developed a tool—Personal Assistant for Software Engineers—to aid students in the learning of the PSP. The tool has been successfully used in four subjects for a semester. Following feedback and evaluation, it has been redesigned, and is currently in stage two. The tool has been useful for students, and has automated the previous manual process of producing time and defect reports, along with project summaries, thus allowing them to focus on the meaning of the information.