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This paper is concerned with the purpose of functions of abstracting and abstracting services, touching on indexing only in relation to the indexing of abstracts, and concentrating mainly on ‘hard copy’ printed services. It is presented from the viewpoint of both a producer of an abstracting service and a user of other peoples' abstracting services.

The large scale and far reaching functions of local government in the United Kingdom today are eloquent proofs of the universal demand for local services of high quality and wide coverage extending into almost every sector of life from literally the cradle to the grave. In the cities of Britain local government is often found to employ more people than any other single organisation. There are some 25,400 councillors in Britain and around 2,500,000 employees. The total expenditure of local authorities in England and Wales for 1984–85 was estimated at £24,323,000,000.1 The services provided include departments for development and planning, art galleries, libraries, museums, engineers, building surveyors, environmental health, architects, estate surveyors, housing, leisure and recreation, social services, economic development, education, transport, highways, trading standards, fire brigade, and police. In addition each local authority has departments mainly concerned with services to the other departments: the chief executive or secretary, personnel and management, solicitor, treasurer, and central purchasing services. Each of these departments has several important subdivisions, and clearly all require a constant inflow of information, and increasingly it is recognised local authorities generate large quantities of important information which can be used more widely with benefit within the authority, as well as outside.

The purpose of this paper is to assess college students’ pre- and post- health-related, fitness levels, as determined by the American College of Sports Medicine’s (ACSM) five components of fitness, in a one-credit, graded college course and to objectively measure any differences between those pre- and post- health-related fitness levels.

In a field setting, the investigators conducted health-related, fitness assessments using the ACSM validated protocols. In addition, descriptive statistics were collected including demographic information, such as, age and sex.

Paired-sample t tests were used to calculate the pre- and post-test scores for six fitness- and health-related categories across four semesters. There were statistically significant (p<0.001) improvements in six different areas in each of the four semesters with the exception of the resting heart rate and VO2 Max measurements in the fall semester of 2014.

This study builds upon the current body of work tracking trends in physical activity, college courses. The results answer health promotion scientists’ call for more research on the implementation and evaluation of programmatic interventions (Domitrovich and Greendberg, 2000; Durlack, 1998; Durlak and DuPre, 2008) “in real-world settings in order to understand if and how an intervention works” (Søvik et al., 2016, p. 238). This results in addressing a research gap in assessing the effectiveness of physical activity courses in higher education (Keating et al., 2005).

The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical framework that explains how performance management (PM) affects the organisational effectiveness in the third sector.

The authors adopt a two stage process in developing the theoretical framework; a systematic review of literature and theoretical developments of the framework. The underlying principles for developing the theoretical framework are mainly based on prior theoretical justification and empirical research in management accounting and international development fields.

Drawing upon contingency theory, the authors propose a theoretical framework explaining how the contingency variables affect PM and organisational effectiveness in the third sector. The authors discuss the justification for contingency theory as well as its weaknesses in the PM research. The authors also highlight how a modified Performance Management and Control Framework could be used to identify PM practices in the third sector. The organisational effectiveness can be measured using the four domains the authors suggest in this paper. Finally the authors put forward propositions that can be empirically tested in future studies.

This conceptual paper opens an opportunity for future empirical research to cross-validate the model in a large survey through confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling.

This paper helps researchers and practitioners to understand how modern PM tools integrate with third sector characteristics to optimise the effectiveness of individual organisations.

Integrating insights across disciplines, this paper strengthens cumulative knowledge on conceptualisation of PM and effectiveness within the third sector.