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Many service industries are facing severe labor shortages. As a result, service providers are turning to new sources of labor, such as service robots. Critics however often point out that service robots lack emotional communication capabilities without which they cannot be expected to truly replace human employees and fill the emerging labor market gaps. Here, a research agenda for the investigation of the role of emotional communication by service robots and its effects on customers and their service experience are laid out. This paper aims to propose that research in this area will further understanding of how service robots can add value to service frontlines, engage customers, increasingly replace service employees and ultimately help overcome pressing labor shortages.

A research agenda structured around the three-step emotional communication process (i.e. read, decide and express) and the four emotional communication strategies crucial for service interactions (i.e. mimicking, alleviating, infusing and preventing) are conceptualized.

Three contributions are made. First, the importance of emotional communication by service robots during service interactions is highlighted. Second, interdisciplinary research priorities and opportunities in this emerging field are mapped out. Third, a theoretical structure to connect the findings of future studies is provided.

Service research investigating the role and implications of emotional communication by service robots is scarce. A research agenda to guide the exploration of this crucial, yet underresearched component of customer-robot service interactions is structured and mapped out.

Service robots present a new frontier in the provision of services, with far-reaching implications for customers and managers alike. The purpose of this chapter is to examine how service robots impact service providers' current marketing strategies. For this, the authors perform an integrative, nonsystematic review of international gray and academic literature to understand how both practitioners and academics perceive the impacts of the technology. Based on this analysis, the present work identifies three key themes that emerge from the current state of practitioner and academic research, namely (1) service robots demand new core business capabilities and competencies, (2) service robots offer new value propositions, and (3) service robots impact not only service providers' cost structures but also revenue streams. These insights are combined into the Service Robot Innovation Canvas, a visual tool for service providers to identify the impact of service robot implementations on a company's marketing strategy. In addition, based on the analyzed literature, the most pressing questions for researchers are laid out in a research agenda.

The nature and purpose of the catalogue has been the focus of considerable and vigorous debate during the past decade. This article attempts to identify those topics which have been the most significant causes of the debate and discusses: the need for catalogues; users and non‐users; the nature of the bibliographic record and catalogue entry; the development of UK and LC MARC; standards, including exchange formats, the development of the ISBD, and the concept of UBC (Universal Bibliographic Control); the Anglo‐American Cataloguing Rules and the controversy over the implementation of AACR2; COM catalogues; subsets of the MARC record; co‐operatives, networks and resource sharing; and the development of subject access methods better suited to COM and online catalogues. The relevance of catalogue research activities at Bath University and elsewhere is highlighted.

The developments in the use of computer systems in libraries from 1966 to date have been great. This report, written to coincide with the twenty‐first anniversary of the publication of Program, looks at some of these developments, in Britain, in North America, and in other countries. It traces the history of library automation from the early experimental systems through to the co‐operative systems, the locally developed systems, the mini‐ and microcomputer‐based and stand‐alone integrated systems that are available today.

This purpose of this paper is to review Marc Prensky's book Teaching Digital Natives: Partnering for Real Learning.

Prensky's book takes aim at classroom practices, arguing that there are more effective ways for students to acquire knowledge and skills. Specifically, teachers should move from “tell and explain” pedagogical techniques to those that “ask and challenge”. This paper considers Prensky's approach in light of today's K‐12 educational system, what K‐12 education needs to deliver for the future, and relevant research findings.

Our education system faces two unprecedented challenges: all children must be educated, without exception; and for a future that is unknowable. Marc Prensky provides a simple answer to both: if education can't provide students the answers for negotiating the future, it must provide them the skills to figure it out for themselves. Prensky's advice for teachers is consistent with recent research about the importance of student engagement to learning. The practicality of his prescriptions is questioned, however, especially given the constructs of our educational system and No Child Left Behind.

While Prensky's book was written primarily for an audience of K‐12 teachers, this paper will be of greatest interest to K‐12 administrators and reformers. The paper suggests that, while Prensky's approach may be valid, it is unrealistic to expect a wholesale change among teaching practices if the structure of school itself does not change to enable and support those new teaching practices.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the Electronic Theses and Dissertations program implemented and managed by the Indiana State University since 2009. The paper illustrates issues relating to the background, policies, platform, workflow and cataloging, as well as the publication and preservation of graduate scholarship.

The authors examined many aspects of the Electronic Theses and Dissertations program and addressed issues dealt before, during and after the publication of the electronic theses and dissertations collection. The approaches the authors utilized are literature review and personal management experience from working on the program.

Implementing an Electronic Theses and Dissertations program involves providing a series of management services. These services include developing relevant policies, implementing an archiving and publication platform and creating submission and publishing workflows, as well as cataloging, disseminating and preserving the student collection. Openly publishing the collection through a range of access points significantly increases its visibility and accessibility. Adopting several archival and preservation strategies ensures the long-term readiness of the collection.

This paper will provide useful practices for implementing an ETD program to those institutions new to the ETD initiative process. It also contributes to the current body of literature and to the overall improvement of ETD programs globally.

Today's online catalogs typically access machine‐readable records for books, journal titles, and audio‐visual materials, and indicate their circulation status. In the future, the database of these traditional records may be dwarfed by additional databases that will become part of the future electronic library. A few libraries are already experimenting with the addition of other text files to their catalogs. Broad‐band telecommunications networks and supporting technologies are being developed rapidly and will significantly affect the evolution of online catalogs. Growing applications of online catalogs, and network access to them, will require more sophisticated and powerful processing. Six prominent consultants—Joseph Becker, Gayla Kraetsch Hartsough, Raymond DeBuse, Jose‐Marie Griffiths, Rick Richmond, and Wilson Stahl—address these and related issues.

In the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Bloc countries of Central and Eastern Europe most information technology was unavailable, unaffordable or discouraged for forty years. These countries realise that they must improve their internal infrastructures if they are to become integral parts of the global information infrastructure. We report the results of a mail survey conducted in late 1994 and early 1995 of seventy research libraries in Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia, building on the findings from interviews conducted with 300 persons in the region in 1993–1994. Results show that these libraries are acquiring automated processing systems, CD‐ROM databases, and connections to computer networks at a rapid rate and that automation activity has increased substantially since 1989; we report specific data on system implementation and network services by country and by type of library. ‘Access’ is their top reason to automate, which appears to mean placing the catalogue online with better search capabilities and putting items on the shelves faster — but does not necessarily mean improvements in self‐service for library users. Co‐operation and standards are highly‐ranked automation goals, yet we find anomalous results on each. Management goals focus more on speed and processing than on management information, staffing or advancing the mission of the parent organisation. Management of human resources ranks low, despite the need for wider staff involvement in the system selection process, education of technically‐trained library professionals, continuing training of staff and training of library users. We conclude with implications of these results for the region.

The Association of Library Collections and Technical Services, better known as ALCTS, is a division of the American Library Association.

Approximately once a month, ALCTS hosts an “eForum”, which is a moderated email-based discussion. The February 2016 ALCTS eForum was called “Career Progression in Cataloging and Metadata”.

It was led by Lisa Robinson of Michigan State University and Stacie Traill of the University of Minnesota. Lisa and Stacie have provided a summary of the discussion on a publicly accessible website which is referenced at the end of the column.

There were a number of comments and discussion threads which reflect the changing nature of library data or metadata; how it is created and managed; and the specific skill sets of catalogers and metadata librarians. This installment of the Data Deluge contains an examination and discussion of challenges associated with the role and career progression of catalogers and metadata specialists as they establish their place in the emerging linked data movement in libraries.