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Requests received by the West Midland Regional Library Bureau (WMRLB) during a four week period early in 1976 were monitored within the Region and copies of all the requests were submitted to the British Library Lending Division. An analysis of the type of material requested is given. The response of the West Midland Regional Library System (WMRLS) to the requests was tested by a questionnaire to member libraries. The response of the BLLD to the ‘hypothetical’ requests was monitored by the BLLD Research section. The two systems are compared in terms of levels of satisfaction, speed of supply, cost and price to participating libraries. It appears that the overall satisfaction rate from the two systems is similar, that the BLLD provides a quicker alternative for items it has available in stock, and that the costs of the present system might be reduced if all requests were sent direct to the BLLD. Possible mixed systems are also mentioned.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between board ethical commitment and the performance of the company. When directors embed ethics in discharging their duty, it will prohibit frauds, unnecessary actions and decisions that are detrimental to the company.

This study collected data for two years i.e. 2013 and 2014 from the annual report of the biggest 500 companies by market capitalisation as of 31 December 2013 listed under Bursa Malaysia stock exchange. Board ethical commitment is measured based on the Malaysian Code of Corporate Governance (MCCG) and various international best practices while corporate performance is measured based on return on equity, return on assets, net profit margin, market to book value and TobinQ.

This study found that ethical commitment by the board has a significant positive relationship with corporate performance. The findings are robust to the alternative performance measurements and lagged one-year corporate performance.

This paper enhances the theoretical understanding of the contribution of the board of ethical commitment to the sustainable performance of the company. However, this study suffered from a limited data collection period of two years only from the annual report of the company.

This study provides an indicator that the directors need to provide a good ethical leadership example to the employees and committed to built a good ethical work culture in the organisation via establishment of code of ethics. In addition, this code needs to be promoted, enforced and embedded in the operations of the organisation.

This study is original as it not only examines board ethical commitment from MCCG 2012 but also international best practices from various countries such as UK, USA and Europe. It also contributed to the literature and theoretical understanding of the importance of board ethical commitment specifically in developing countries like Malaysia that scarce in the literature.

As the world's largest document supply centre, the British Library has re‐examined the needs of its customers in the 1990s. Operating in an international marketplace, we recognise that our ‘wholesale’ role is becoming increasingly attractive to a wide range of commercial ‘information intermediaries’. These intermediaries have the potential to provide a high‐quality service to local and specialist end users, often in combination with other services and complementary information sources. To meet the higher expectations of our future customers the British Library has developed plans to strengthen this market infrastructure and to support the needs of qualified intermediaries fully. The developing markets and information ‘customers’ are beginning to value ‘managed information access’ realistically. With afresh approach to the management and development of its commercial service portfolio, the British Library believes that the new standards it is now setting for the support of customers within the emergent market infrastructure will facilitate many new opportunities for information professionals and related suppliers. The paper describes the underlying themes that have led the British Library's document supply centre to evolve an enhanced commercial strategy and maintain its reputation for international leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between corporate governance and company performance and how a board’s ethical commitment can influence this relationship. Prior studies documented mixed evidence on the corporate governance and corporate performance relationship, which can be due to the influence of a board’s ethical commitment and will shape the corporate governance mechanism in the company and, in turn, influence performance.

This study collected data for two years, i.e. 2013 and 2014, from the biggest 500 Malaysian companies listed in the stock exchange. Corporate governance is measured based on the requirements of the Malaysian Code of Corporate Governance (MCCG), while a board’s ethical commitment is measured based on the MCCG and various international best practices. Corporate performance is measured based on return on equity, return on assets, net profit margin, market-to-book value and TobinQ.

A board’s ethical commitment was found to be significant in increasing the strength of the relationship between corporate governance and corporate performance. The findings are robust to the alternative performance measurements and lagged one-year corporate performance.

This paper provides further evidence on the importance of ethical practices to improve corporate environment and, hence, sustain a company’s performance. This study, however, was conducted on only large companies with a limited data collection period.

This study provides an indicator that the policymaker and regulatory authorities need to double their efforts in promoting and encouraging a board of directors to take a bold step in improving its ethical culture. Shareholders and investors need to use their power and rights to demand the company to improve their governance and ethical practices.

This study is original, as it measures a board’s ethical commitment from various sources of local and international best practices such as Malaysia, Australia, Canada, Norway, South Korea, Singapore, Sweden, Turkey, the UK and the USA. It also contributes to the literature and theoretical understanding of the interaction between a board’s ethical commitment and corporate governance on corporate performance, particularly in developing countries like Malaysia, which is scarce in the literature.

One of the most significant recent developments for libraries has been the increasing availability of electronic versions of journals produced by the major publishers. Virtually instant online access to the full text of articles is engineering a fundamental rethink of how libraries provide information and services to their users: are libraries as physical entities still needed; can end‐users go it alone in searching for and retrieving documents they require; how can new and traditional services be effectively integrated, and so on. However, while technically many things are possible, the business models, the information delivery infrastructure, and the shifting relationships between the traditional players, are still in a state of flux and do not as yet provide a solid basis on which libraries can make confident decisions about the future. Explores the role of document supply services in the new paradigm and argues that, if they can seize the opportunity, they will have a vital though substantially different role to play.

This paper aims to explore the effectiveness of an artificial neural network (ANN) in predicting fraudulent financial reporting in small market capitalization companies in Malaysia.

Based on the concepts of ANN, a mathematical model was developed to compare non-fraud and fraud companies selected from among small market capitalization companies in Malaysia; the fraud companies had already been charged by the Securities Commission for falsification of financial statements. Ten financial ratios are used as fraud risk indicators to predict fraudulent financial reporting using ANN.

The findings indicate that the proposed ANN methodology outperforms other statistical techniques widely used for predicting fraudulent financial reporting.

The study is one of few to adopt the ANN approach for the prediction of financial reporting fraud.

Examines the interlending scene in the UK over the last 80 years and looks forward to what the future might hold. The decentralised beginnings of interlending in the 1920s and 1930s are contrasted with the move to centralisation which attended the formation of the National Library for Science and Technology in the 1960s. The recent demise in the UK of the centralised system is described and analysed. Outlines the British Library’s role in the emerging distributed electronic environment for document supply, and concludes with personal reflections on the current changes to the document supply landscape in the UK.

In the first two articles in this series we covered the development of a joint training strategy and gave an account of that strategy in practice. In that account we outlined the areas that we covered during the two sets of courses—separate/parallel training and joint training. In this the concluding article on the development of joint training strategies we cover the key elements of the training design in more depth and provide examples of the methods that we use.

In the first article in this series we defined joint training; explained why it may be appropriate in industrial relations training, particularly as a problem‐solving approach, and then covered the issues that arise when considering its use and the development of a suitable strategy. In the development of a strategy we referred to the key phases:

This review looks firstly at a set of recent articles that examine basic concepts of interlending in particular and resource sharing in general. Some authors are supportive of resource sharing and interlending, while others question its validity, demanding better examination of its benefits or better local provision. A very forthright paper concentrates on access, whilst another foresees greater user involvement in interlending. New technological developments are reported in a review of several articles on the successes and failures of telefacsimile transmission, ending with a brief mention of a new development — CD—hypenROMs. The European Communities' Docolsys proposal is reported, and a series of contrasting articles on interlending and union catalogues in the USSR is discussed. Recent developments in Canada are briefly reported, and the review ends with a consideration of a paper on humanities interlending requests surveyed by a Spanish research institute.