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The purpose of this study is to identify and examine the factors that affected the scale of ILL photocopy requests between Japanese university libraries from 1994 to 2008.

Based on the newly developed conceptual framework to interpret the rise and fall in ILL, more than 10 million requests, sent through a nation‐wide system called NACSIS‐ILL from 1994 to 2008 were quantitatively analyzed.

The number of photocopy requests for articles in foreign journals started to decrease in 2000, due to the dramatic increase of e‐journal titles made accessible through “Big Deal” contracts that came into effect in 2002 as well as other similar trials prior to it. On the other hand, requests for articles in domestic journals, mostly written in Japanese, continued to increase until 2006. The main factor for this increase was the expansion of journal title coverage in bibliographic databases, which enabled users to retrieve more references. However, requests decreased in 2007, because of advances in digitization in the Japanese academic environment.

This research proposes a conceptual model to understand document demand and service patterns observed in nation‐wide ILL services. It also successfully draws a comprehensive picture of ILL in Japanese higher education institutions, based on more than 10 million request records over 15 years, and it shows how the number of ILL requests correlates with the availability of requested journals in electronic form.

This research proposes a conceptual model to understand document demand and service patterns observed in nation‐wide ILL services. It also successfully draws a comprehensive picture of ILL in Japanese higher education institutions, based on more than 10 million request records over 15 years, and it shows how the number of ILL requests correlates with the availability of requested journals in electronic form.

The purpose of this study is to clarify the indicators and measures that correspond to the dimensions of users' evaluation of university library service.

In a previous study, the authors had clarified the four dimensions that construct the evaluation of service quality through factor analyses of the survey data. In this study, nine focus group interviews were undertaken, at the libraries of four universities in Japan, England and Finland. With the aim to recapture the four dimensions in the concrete contexts of library use, the transcripts were analyzed and mapped according to the dimensions: “Effect of Service – Personal,” “Library as ‘Ba’,” “Collection and Access” and “Effect of Service – Organizational.” Another goal of the FGIs was to find out what measures should be added to the questionnaire, if any.

Usage scenarios were clarified for each user group – undergraduates, graduate students and faculty members, and the contents of interview statements were mapped to the tree based on the dimensions. As a result, the features and the background of four dimensions were revealed, and some clues for changes in the service quality assessment instrument were extracted.

Though the interviews were conducted in international/diverse contexts, it is necessary to be discreet about generalization and further examinations are required.

This article addresses considerations important to the service quality assessment in university libraries.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the characteristics of healthcare facilities that produce the most efficient inpatient orthopedic surgery using a large-scale medical claims database in Japan.

Reimbursement claims data were obtained from April 1 through September 30, 2014. Input-oriented Banker-Charnes-Cooper model of data envelopment analysis (DEA) was employed. The decision-making unit was defined as a healthcare facility where orthopedic surgery was performed. Inputs were defined as the length of stay, the number of beds, and the total costs of expensive surgical devices. Output was defined as total surgical fees for each surgery. Efficiency scores of healthcare facilities were compared among different categories of healthcare facilities.

The efficiency scores of healthcare facilities with a diagnosis-procedure combination (DPC) reimbursement were significantly lower than those without DPC (p=0.0000). All the efficiency scores of clinics with beds were 1. Their efficiency scores were significantly higher than those of university hospitals, public hospitals, and other hospitals (p=0.0000).

This is the first research that applied DEA for orthopedic surgery in Japan. The healthcare facilities with DPC reimbursement were less efficient than those without DPC. The clinics with beds were the most efficient among all types of management bodies of healthcare facilities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the association between outpatient orthopedic surgery costs and Japan’s healthcare facilities using a large-scale Japanese medical claims database.

The authors obtained reimbursement claims data for 8,588 patients who underwent orthopedic surgery between April 1 and September 30, 2014 at 3,347 Japanese healthcare facilities. Regression analysis, using ordinary least squares, examined the association between outpatient orthopedic surgery costs and healthcare facility characteristics. By using surgical fees as proxy for the surgical costs, the authors defined three dependent variables: surgical cost for each outpatient orthopedic surgery; pre- and post-operative cost one month before and after a surgical operation; and total cost for each patient. The authors also defined five independent variables, which capture healthcare facility characteristics and patient-specific factors: bed count; whether healthcare facilities are reimbursed in a diagnosis procedure combination system; patient’s age; sex; and anatomical surgical sites.

The authors analyzed 6,456 outpatient orthopedic surgical cases performed at 3,085 healthcare facilities. There were significant differences in the surgical costs for outpatient orthopedic surgery among different healthcare facilities by total beds (p=0.000). Multivariate regression analysis shows that surgical costs for outpatient orthopedic surgery are positively and significantly associated with healthcare facilities classified by total beds after adjusting for patient-specific characteristics (p<0.05).

This is the first research to examine the association between costs for outpatient orthopedic surgery and healthcare facility characteristics in Japan. This study via the multivariate regression method showed that outpatient orthopedic surgery is likely to cost higher as healthcare facility size increased. The average incremental costs for each outpatient orthopedic surgery per 100 beds were calculated at $48.5 for surgery, $40.7 for pre- and post-operative care, and $89.2 total cost.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the push effect of risk on supply chain (SC) performance, a new concept in the SC risk body of literature, at service-oriented firms.

Two models were compared: first, contains relationships between risks that show the mechanism of the push effect, i.e. the theoretical model. The other, only exists in direct effects of risks on SC performance, i.e. the competitive model.

Test results proved that the mechanism of the push effect can increase the degree of impact of each and all risks on outputs. By the push effect, risks can explain up to 65 percent variance of SC performance compared with 52 percent of the model without push effect. Moreover, the research found two kinds of the push effect: positive – increasing the impact of “pushed” factors on outputs and vice versa for negative.

The mechanism of the push influence will be broken if mutual interaction among risks was minimized. Practitioners and managers can apply the resultant model as a “road map” in their context to achieve this purpose.

Vargo and Lusch (2008) argued that service-oriented firms will be a new trend since the modern-day industry tends to more focus on customer demand. SC management gradually shifted toward demand chain management that organizations will not make and sell units of output but producing customized services to customers (Walters, 2008). This transformation has led to the emergence of new risks, the impact of risk on the SC also varies and the mismatch of the current risk mitigation strategies (Lusch et al., 2007). Dealing with these changes is the purpose of this research.

This paper aims to present the investigation of the linear and nonlinear seismic site response of a saturated inhomogeneous poroviscoelastic soil profile for different soil properties, such as pore-water saturation, non-cohesive fines content FC, permeability k, porosity n and coefficient of uniformity C_u.

The inhomogeneous soil profile is idealized as a multi-layered saturated poroviscoelastic medium and is characterized by the Biot’s theory, with a shear modulus varying continuously with depth according to the Wichtmann’s model. Seismic response analysis has been evaluated through a computational model, which is based on the exact stiffness matrix method formulated in the frequency domain assuming that the incoming seismic waves consist of inclined P-SV waves.

Unlike the horizontal seismic response, the results indicate that the vertical one is strongly affected by the pore water saturation. Moreover, in the case of fully saturated soil profile, the same vertical response spectra are found for the two cases of soil behavior, linear and nonlinear.

This research is a detailed study of the geotechnical soil properties effect on the bi-directional seismic response of saturated inhomogeneous poroviscoelastic soil profile, which has not been treated before; the results are presented in terms of the peak acceleration ratio, as well as the free-field response spectra and the spectral ratio (V/H).