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There is a worldwide increase in the use of referral services, and a number of projects or services are already under way. The aim of referral projects is to develop aids for users of information in selecting the most appropriate information resources for their needs. Some of the benefits that can result from referral services are: easier access to systems and better use of information resources, cost savings due to short search time, easily readable and uniform information service description, unbiased guidance etc.

Looks at the effects reduction in Local Government spending has had on race initiatives in the multi‐racial library service. Notes that multi racial librarians will be required to work two days a week at designated service points therefore diluting the service they provide. Concludes that a service for black and ethnic minority communities may be forced to depend on income from the very communities it was created to serve.

AS FAIRLY WARNED to you earlier this year would transpire, what you are now reading is the 100th issue of NEW LIBRARY WORLD, a span of issues which has encompassed some 8½ years, several million words, a sizeable copse of trees to produce the paper on which those issues have been printed.

Magnetostatic problems including iron components can be solved by a nonlinear indirect volume integral equation. Its unknowns are scalar field sources. They are evaluated iteratively. In doing so the integral representation of fields has to be calculated. At edges singularities occur. Following a method to calculate the field strength on charged surfaces a way out is presented.

Charitable Choice Policy, the heart of President Bush’s Faith‐Based Initiative, is the direct government funding of religious organizations for the purpose of carrying out government programs. The Bush presidential administration has called for the application of Charitable Choice Policy to all kinds of social services. Advocates for child‐abuse victims contend that the Bush Charitable Choice Policy would further dismantle essential social services provided to abused children. Others have argued Charitable Choice Policy is unconstitutional because it crosses the boundary separating church and state. Rather than drastically altering the US social‐policy landscape, this paper demonstrates that the Bush Charitable Choice Policy already is in place for childabuse services across many of the fifty states. One reason this phenomenon is ignored is due to the reliance on the public‐private dichotomy for studying social policies and services. This paper contends that relying on the public‐private dichotomy leads researchers to overlook important configurations of actors and institutions that provide services to abused children. It offers an alternate framework to the public‐private dichotomy useful for the analysis of social policy in general and, in particular, Charitable Choice Policy affecting services to abused children. Employing a new methodological approach, fuzzy‐sets analysis, demonstrates the degree to which social services for abused children match ideal types. It suggests relationships between religious organizations and governments are essential to the provision of services to abused children in the United States. Given the direction in which the Bush Charitable Choice Policy will push social‐policy programs, scholars should ask whether abused children will be placed in circumstances that other social groups will not and why.

The application of the fast multipole method reduces the computational costs and the memory requirements of the boundary element method from O(N²) to approximately O(N). In this paper we present that the computational costs can be strongly shortened, when the multipole method is not only used for the solution of the system of linear equations but also for the field computation in arbitrary points.

The effects of board composition on performance have long been discussed in management research using fractionalization measures. In this study, we propose an alternative measurement approach based on board polarization.

Using an exploratory analysis and applying the polarization measure to German Deutscher Aktienindex (DAX)-, Midcap-DAX (MDAX)- and Small Cap-Index (SDAX)-listed companies, this paper applies the polarization index to examine the relationship between board diversity and performance.

The results show that the polarization concept is well suited to measure principal-agent problems between the members of the management and supervisory boards. We reveal that board polarization is negatively associated with firm performance, as measured by return on investment (ROI).

This exploratory study shows that the measurement of board polarization can be linked to performance differences between companies, which offers promising starting points for further research.

In this chapter, I will outline the labels of giftedness and underachievement and present the theoretical debates surrounding these labels. A historicist examination of these labels follows, highlighting how the gifted underachievement (GUA) label emerges through the negation of “giftedness.” Subsequently, I explore the concept of GUA and its negative connotations, stemming from the positive valuation inherent in the term “giftedness” and its implications for what is considered “normal.” This chapter also reviews perspectives on shifting the focus away from the individual within the current paradigm of labeling giftedness and explores insights from systemic thinking and symbolic interactionism (SI). The conclusion underscores the necessity of a symbolic interactionist perspective to address the gaps in research on the labeling of giftedness and underachievement. Finally, I propose a generic definition that can be used in GUA research in the light of SI.

Many Web 2.0 services (including Library 2.0 catalogs) make use of folksonomies. The purpose of this paper is to cut off all tags in the long tail of a document‐specific tag distribution. The remaining tags at the beginning of a tag distribution are considered power tags and form a new, additional search option in information retrieval systems.

In a theoretical approach the paper discusses document‐specific tag distributions (power law and inverse‐logistic shape), the development of such distributions (Yule‐Simon process and shuffling theory) and introduces search tags (besides the well‐known index tags) as a possibility for generating tag distributions.

Search tags are compatible with broad and narrow folksonomies and with all knowledge organization systems (e.g. classification systems and thesauri), while index tags are only applicable in broad folksonomies. Based on these findings, the paper presents a sketch of an algorithm for mining and processing power tags in information retrieval systems.

This conceptual approach is in need of empirical evaluation in a concrete retrieval system.

Power tags are a new search option for retrieval systems to limit the amount of hits.

The paper introduces power tags as a means for enhancing the precision of search results in information retrieval systems that apply folksonomies, e.g. catalogs in Library 2.0 environments.