Search results

This article describes how a Web‐enabled‐performance‐measurement system was designed, implemented and used to improve the business performance of a company processing aluminum foil in central Scotland. The benefits of the system are analyzed in the context of the business‐process‐based structure of the performance measurement system and the evolution of a business improvement culture led by an enlightened general manager. The importance of the use of statistical quality control techniques by the management team to monitor impact of critical input variables on process performance is emphasized.

The recent resolution of the Aberdeen Libraries Committee to stock shilling books, which was commented upon somewhat acidly by our contributor “Eratosthenes” last month, has aroused rather widespread interest. In particular it has given rise to an article in the Newsagent in which it is argued that the admirable policy of certain publishers in recent years of publishing standard works at cheap prices, has completely demoralised the argument for the lending department of public libraries as at present organised. As anybody can buy whole sets of books at a shilling a volume, the supposed necessity of a public institution providing books vanishes. The public library, if it is to retain its utility, ought to eschew such works and confine its function to more expensive works not attainable by persons of ordinary means; and much else. This is an example of the rather cheap trade reasoning in which a certain type of journalist delights to indulge. The aim of the public library, in his view, is so to adjust its activities that it shall not spoil the chance of a book‐seller selling one or two copies of a work in any given town. In actual fact its business is nothing of the kind; it is to supply the representative literature, first of this country, and then of the world, so far as its limited means permit, and price is an entirely secondary or tertiary consideration. It would be as reasonable to exclude daffodils from public parks because bulbs are cheap, and every man who wants them can buy them for himself, as to exclude any great book from a library because it happens to be cheap. Writers often enunciate good principles from low motives, and the principles which should determine the librarian against the cheap book are the qualities of fragile paper, poor type, poor sewing and poorer binding, which must necessarily accompany cheap books. Cheap “libraries,” which parade in the guise of text books or manuals of knowledge, should be excluded for reasons already given in these pages; they pretend to do what in most cases it is impossible to do. Bishop Mandell Creighton, in addressing library students at the London School of Economics, stated as a postulate of reading, that the student should always go to the largest book on his subject, and that in an equal amount of time he would gain more knowledge from the large book than he would from any brief conspectus of his subject. The fact that a journal should presume, from obviously inadequate knowledge, to question the utility of public lending libraries, in which shilling books form but an infinitesimal fraction of the stock, is surprising only to those among us who do not know that every journalist imagines he has been divinely inspired by Providence to expatiate upon libraries.

Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford: the names of these universities instantly conjure up images of the highest attainments of higher education. Of course, great universities also operate great university presses. So any reference book with the name of Oxford, Cambridge, or Harvard in the title possesses immediate credibility and saleability. But it was not always so. Prior to the latter half of the nineteenth century the Oxford and the Cambridge University Presses were known to the public primarily as publishers of the Bible. Oxford broke into reference publishing, and along with it widespread public recognition, by means of its famous dictionaries, of which the pinnacle was the massive Oxford English Dictionary. The Cambridge University Press [hereafter referred to as CUP] took a different approach to publishing scholarly reference works by producing authoritative and encyclopedic histories. According to S.C. Roberts, a long‐time secretary to the Syndics of the CUP, “apart from the Bible, the first book that made the Press well known to the general public was the Cambridge Modern History.”

The purpose of this study was to determine whether, and how, electricity consumption by students in university residence halls were impacted through three intervention strategies.

The current investigation uses a quasi-experimental design by exposing freshman students in four matched residence halls and the use of three different interventions designed to encourage energy conservation, specifically electricity conservation. A control residence hall received no intervention. One residence hall had an energy dashboard prominently displayed. Another received various communications and programming designed to raise awareness of the need for energy conservation. A fourth residence hall had an energy dashboard and received programming. Electricity consumption among the residence halls was compared using multivariate analysis.

Students in all residence halls receiving interventions demonstrated significantly lower electricity consumption compared to the control residence hall. Across two years with different student populations, results were consistent: the residence hall receiving only the communications and programming, but not the dashboard, had the lowest electricity use. The residence hall with only the dashboard also demonstrated a significant but smaller decline in electricity use. Curiously, the residence hall wherein both interventions were used demonstrated the smallest decline in electricity use.

While total costs for the communications and programming are difficult to accurately assess, the results suggest that this approach is cost-effective when compared to the avoided cost of electricity and is superior in terms of electricity cost savings to both the dashboards and to the combined intervention. Results also suggest that any intervention is likely to induce a large enough electricity reduction to be cost-effective and there may be non-economic benefits as well.

This study takes advantage of the availability of four “matched” residence halls to approximate the rigor of a controlled quasi-experimental design to compare different strategies for inducing electricity consumption among freshman residents.