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Niche sports such as women's professional sport leagues face many challenges to developing and expanding their fan base. Understanding sport fans, segmenting consumer bases and targeting them effectively can assist in both developing the fan base and competing for investments like sponsorships and media rights. The purpose of this study was to explore consumer segments of the National Pro Fastpitch (NPF), a niche softball league, by identifying demographic and psychographic characteristics of the segments and developing a persona for each segment.

Data were collected from 3,463 NPF consumers with the assistance of NPF league officials using their social media outlets. A two-step cluster analysis was performed employing both categorical and continuous variables to inform the segmentation, which was followed with chi-squared statistics and two MANOVAs to compare the segments' demographic characteristics, points of attachment (POAs) levels and attendance and viewership of NPF games.

Three distinct consumer segments with unique demographic, POA and softball participation characteristics were identified. Differences among these segments' consumption of NPF games validated the existence of three distinct consumer segments.

This research is the first to examine consumer behavior in women's softball, and it expands the sport marketing literature through the identification of consumer segments of a niche sport league with a novel cluster analysis. Blending theory and practice by incorporating both demographic and psychographic variables into market segmentation, the research uniquely serves this niche sport and thereby informs improved marketing practice.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a collaborative study on supervision with health and social care practitioners in Scotland. The study attempted to gain a better understanding about the use and benefit of supervision from a multiprofessional perspective.

Consultation events with health and social care staff and 12 informant interviews were undertaken. Data analysis was via the Framework Method.

Managers were more likely to conceive of supervision as a positive intervention than those in lower pay bands. The practice of supervision was variable. Not all staff appeared to take part in regular supervisory activities even when it was mandated. A lack of professional, organisational or local commitment to implement robust supervisory structures and processes was seen as the major barrier to effective supervision.

This was a small study, thus findings would need to be confirmed by health and social care staff working across a wider spectrum of disciplines and regions across Scotland.

A combination of factors would seem to determine effective supervisory practice. Supervision was perceived to be of benefit when individuals were willing to participate fully, when there was reflection and planned action, constructive challenge, respectful relationships, regular and protected sessions and processes were appropriate to an employee’s circumstances.

This study situates supervision in the current context of health and social care and finds it to be an irregular practice. The findings confirm the existing literature about the importance of supervisor-supervisee relationships but explain differing perceptions of supervision in terms of staff seniority.

WELL stands for Well‐being, Education, Lifestyle and Living. Nancy Graham describes how the WELL Project in Northern Ireland provides social, educational and activity groups for people with long‐term mental illness living in rural communities, using local venues, with the aim to support them into using mainstream leisure and education services, and into employment.

Chadwyck‐Healey Announces the Patrologla Latina Database. The Patrologia Latina Database is a major text conversion and electronic publishing project. It is a complete machine‐readable edition of the classic nineteenth‐century collection of texts edited by the ecclesiastical publisher Jacques‐Paul Migne.

It is important that all those involved with education and training for online searching are aware of the teaching aids which have been produced and are used. This paper aims to provide some of this information by describing primarily aids which have been developed and are used within the UK schools of librarianship and information science; however aids which are used by other organisations in various parts of the world have also been included.

AS OUR subscription‐renewal reminders for 1982 go out, may I offer you a cautionary note— though not, perhaps, the one you will be expecting of me from these introductory words?

TOP TITLES, measured by the number of loans from Dumbarton District Libraries last year, were newish books by the following ten authors: Wilbur Smith, Jeffrey Archer, Catherine Cookson, Virginia Andrews, Danielle Steel, C McCullough, Susan Howatch, Desmond Bagley, Belva Plain, Douglas Reeman. (How can anyone be willing to go through life called ‘Belva Plain’?) The most popular non‐fiction writer was James Herriot, and for children (can you guess?), Enid Blyton.

With the cost of periodical subscriptions increasing every year, our library, like most others, has been attempting to limit our periodicals expenditures and to restrict our current subscriptions to those journals most important to our students and faculty. This article is a report of a study done to help determine which periodicals we should continue to receive and those which we could cancel.

The following annotated list of materials on providing library orientation to users and instructing them in library and information skills is the tenth annual review of this literature and covers publications from 1983. A few items have not been annotated because the compiler was unable to secure a copy of these items.

Presents 31 abstracts, edited by Johanthan Morris and Mike Reed, from the 2003 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, held at Cardiff Business School in September 2003. The conference theme was “The end of management? managerial pasts, presents and futures”. Contributions covered, for example, the changing HR role, managing Kaizen, contradiction in organizational life, organizational archetypes, changing managerial work and gendering first‐time management roles. Case examples come from areas such as Mexico, South Africa, Australia, the USA, Canada and Turkey.