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The main purpose of this paper is to present the work recently carried out by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in collaboration with Associazione per la documentazione le biblioteche e gli archivi (DBA) in Italy to make web CDS/ISIS‐based applications compliant with the OAI‐PMH. CDS/ISIS is an Integrated Storage and Information Retrieval System of Unesco, which is widely used especially in Latin America and Africa. There are hundreds of CDS/ISIS‐based application systems managing bibliographical reference, ensuring high quality content through the use of built‐in authority files, data entry guidelines and validations. It also allows for metadata export in many different formats.

The methodology adopted included study, analysis and evaluation of three existing solutions for exposing metadata from the CDS/ISIS database repositories to the OAI framework.

The implementation did not include the development of automatic procedures for incremental harvesting from CDS/ISIS databases nor the normalization of the harvested data. However, a lot of experience in implementation of OAI was gained which will be useful for future development of non‐CDS/ISIS systems.

The research and development work demonstrates the importance and implications of this work for the whole CDS/ISIS community and specifically for the participating centres from the AGRIS network.

It proposes an open source, easily parametrizable plug‐in tool, which can be adapted to expose metadata from a general structure CDS/ISIS database using the OAI‐PMH protocol. This work assures that semantically rich metadata for agricultural science and research publications based on the “AGRIS Application Profile” can be handled by the OAI protocol. This in turn allows for further creation of additional services based on the exchange of knowledge on agricultural science and technology publications world‐wide.

The main objective of the AGROVOC Concept Server (CS) is to create a collaborative reference platform and a “one‐stop” shop for a pool of commonly used concepts related to agriculture, containing terms, definitions and relationships between terms in multiple languages derived from various sources. This paper aims to address the issues.

The CS offers a centralised facility where the agricultural information management community can build and share agricultural knowledge in a collaborative environment.

The advantages of the CS are its extensibility and modularity that provide the possibility to extend the type of information that can be stored in this system based on user/community needs.

Further investigation still needs to be done on the modularisation of the CS (i.e. the creation of separated ontologies that can still be connected, in order to have domain‐related ontologies and to allow for better performance of the CS).

The CS serves as starting point for the development of specific domain ontologies where multilinguality and the localised representation of knowledge are essential issues. Furthermore, it will offer additional services in order to expose the knowledge to be consumed by other applications.

The CS Workbench provides the AGROVOC partners with the possibility to directly and collaboratively edit the AGROVOC CS. It thus provides the opportunity for direct and open “many‐to‐many” communication links between communities, avoiding decentralised communication between partners and duplication of effort. For the international community, it may allow users to manage, re‐use or extend agriculture‐related knowledge for better interoperability and for improved services.

The purpose of this paper is to explore addressing the accessibility, availability and interoperability issues of exchanging agricultural research output by means of the AGRIS application profile – an exchange metadata standard – and controlled vocabularies or subject‐specific knowledge organisation systems.

Based on an analysis of the open access (OA) publishing model and the open archives initiative (OAI), the authors share their proposal for the architecture for open archive networks in agricultural sciences and technology.

The lack of adequate information exchange possibilities between researchers in food and agricultural sciences represents a significant weakness, limiting the research system to properly help address the issues of agricultural development. The OA publishing model promotes the availability of content online, including grey literature, which is not available through commercial distribution channels but which significantly contributes to agricultural research and development. The new architecture proposed in this paper is based on these OA and OAI paradigms and has three components: the creation of content with agreed content description standards, the harvesting of the content using common exchange standards and the value‐added services provided to the users using the exchanged standard content.

The paper presents how the agricultural sciences and technology community can adopt the OA model and OAI tools. The paper will be useful to information professionals who are planning to improve the accessibility and interoperability of the agricultural research produced in their institution by the creation of institutional repositories.

The purpose of this article is to introduce the papers in the special issue which explores some of the potential, opportunities and challenges to be found in greater library and information science alignment with semantic web developments.

The article is a general review of the papers in the issue.

For many digital libraries or cultural institutions, the semantic web offers an opportunity to better expose valuable digital resources pertaining to research, culture or history, using common standards and technologies in a collaborative and “joined up” way. The papers in this issue “paint a rainbow”, exploring the issues through elements of case studies, reviews research and conceptual expositions and viewpoints.

The article emphasises how the practical implications of semantic web research or developments for digital libraries and repositories is important for LIS professionals.

The study aims to explore the innovative characteristics of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and the link between their innovation and business performance in the emerging Dubai market in the United Arab Emirates.

Using data from 200 SMEs, the study utilizes a structured survey that was developed from a methodical literature review. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to evaluate the findings.

The findings described the innovative characteristics of SMEs and suggested that there is a significant positive link between innovation and business performance.

The study offers SMEs with innovative behaviors a better perspective of their business and market environments. However, the study is limited to SMEs operating in the Dubai marketplace. Future research could also look at other markets and use qualitative research methods.

The study provides important insights that could guide SMEs in their understanding of innovation and its benefit in emerging markets. The findings reinforce the growing empirical evidence of the positive impact of innovation on business performance. The findings also challenge the assumption that innovation drains resources in emerging markets.

In this article a practical framework is proposed, that can be used to organise the activities related to the selection‐process of technology development projects. The framework is based upon recent literature and application at DAF Trucks Company. A technology development project has a long way to go, before it contributes to the productivity of the company. This long lead‐time causes uncertainties and risks. Changes in market‐preferences and upcoming alternative technologies can prematurely make the developing technology become obsolete. In order to reduce the uncertainties and risks, the main technology opportunities and threats need to be identified as early as possible and submitted to a validation process. The technology opportunities and threats then have to be moulded into well‐defined project‐propositions. Out of the project‐propositions those projects should be selected that will best meet the long‐term objectives of the company. This paper is intended to be used as a reference for companies whowant to improve their technology development selection process.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of work–life balance (WLB) inducements of the psychological contract on three work-related outcomes for a sample of Dutch older workers: psychological contract breach, turnover intentions and intentions to participate in development activities.

This paper employs polynomial regression and response surface methodology.

Results show that the volume at which fulfillment occurs is important in predicting feelings of psychological contract violation and intentions to engage in development activities but that this relationship is not straightforward for turnover intentions. Furthermore, under- and over-fulfillment have different relationships with intentions to participate in development activities than previous literature suggests. Additionally, gender moderates a number of the relationships in this study.

This study provides detailed insights regarding the dynamics between promised and delivered WLB inducements and outcomes for a sample of older workers instead of presenting generalized differences between several age groups.

How do we make sense of urban life in the past? What do we do when we study urban history, and to what extent do our methods fully capture the complexities of historical city living? These are crucial questions for any scholar interested in the historical dimensions of urban experience. Notwithstanding the interest of most urban historians in the relationship between the physical form of urban space and its experience by inhabitants and visitors, very few scholars have written histories that systematically integrate these two areas of inquiry. In this chapter, we argue that such research requires a method and an accompanying tool that can analyze historical urban life in a more integrated, holistic way. We propose a way forward by introducing the Time Machine platform as a scalable data visualization and analysis tool for researching everyday urban experience across space and time. To illustrate the potential we focus on a case study: the area of the Bloemstraat in early modern Amsterdam. Unpacking a section of the Bloemstraat, house by house and room by room, we show how the Time Machine forms an instrument to connect spatial layouts to the arrangement of objects and to the practical and social use of the space by the inhabitants and visitors. We also sketch how this tool illuminates more dynamic spatial and temporal practices such as how people, goods, and activities are connected to locations in the wider city and beyond.