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To prevent malpractices, medical staff has adopted inventory time-outs and/or checklists. Accurate inventory and maintenance of surgical instruments decreases the risk of operating room miscounting and malfunction. In our previous study, an individual management of surgical instruments was accomplished using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate a new management method of RFID-tagged instruments.

The management system of RFID-tagged surgical instruments was used for 27 months in clinical areas. In total, 13 study participants assembled surgical trays in the central sterile supply department.

While using the management system, trays were assembled 94 times. During this period, no assembly errors occurred. An instrument malfunction had occurred after the 19th, 56th, and 73th uses, no malfunction caused by the RFID tags, and usage history had been recorded. Additionally, the time it took to assemble surgical trays was recorded, and the long-term usability of the management system was evaluated.

The system could record the number of uses and the defective history of each surgical instrument. In addition, the history of the frequency of instruments being transferred from one tray to another was recorded. The results suggest that our system can be used to manage instruments safely. Additionally, the management system was acquired of the learning effect and the usability on daily maintenance. This finding suggests that the management system examined here ensures surgical instrument and tray assembly quality.

The authors develop a program, named eBraille, to translate Japanese text into braille and thereby generate braille documents easily. Public access to this program is provided to anyone via the Internet. The paper aims to evaluate the translation accuracy of the eBraille program.

eBraille is a CGI program that is accessible via a web browser. The core of the program is a braille translating engine called the Kobe University Intelligent Braille Engine for ChaSen (KUIC). It is based on Japanese Braille Transcription Rules (Japanese Braille Committee, 2001). To evaluate the translation accuracy of eBraille, a corpus was utilized that was created from ordinary text and braille newspaper articles.

The paper finds that eBraille translation accuracy is equivalent to or better than that of other stand‐alone braille translation programs. This result suggests that the program achieved the goal of being applicable for practical use. In addition, the program is utilized to make Kobe University Hospital brochures in braille for outpatients and inpatients. The brochures are available in the hospital and are favorably accepted by the blind and the visually impaired. This result suggests that the translation program can facilitate accessibility to information for patients.

The braille translation program is based on a client‐server system and is architecture‐independent. Moreover, it is a free system for creating braille text files for anyone who has access to a web browser.

The purpose of this study is to examine and compare the different roles and expectations of the school librarians as information literacy (IL) instructors between Hong Kong, Japan, Shanghai, South Korea, and Taipei. School librarians are not merely managers of the school libraries nowadays; they are also expected to serve as administrators, teaching consultants, information specialists and IL teachers, etc. Unfortunately, in many countries, especially in Asia, there has always been a lack of understanding on the parts of the classroom teachers and school administration about their role as IL specialists in the public school system.

The school librarians in Hong Kong, Japan, Shanghai, South Korea and Taipei were invited to take part in a questionnaire survey. A total number of 466 self-completed questionnaires were collected from all 5 regions.

The results indicated that the school librarians in both Taipei and South Korea outperformed the other regions, in terms of the scope and extent of duties and responsibilities these school librarians undertook as IL skills instructors. The staffing and organizational structures amongst the school libraries in Taipei also tended to be far more affluent and “departmentalized” in comparison to the other four regions. Results also indicated that the amount of IL instructions carried out by the school librarians were directly proportional to the frequencies of collaborations the school librarians carried out with other subject teachers as well as the extent the librarians themselves could contribute to the curriculum as both information consultants and curriculum facilitators. Finally, the amount and level of reference duties performed by these school librarians for supporting the teaching of other subject teachers was another factor contributing to the overall success of IL instructions programmes being carried out.

The complex interactions of global trend and local responses in education system cannot easily be understood without the use of comparative studies (Arnove and Torres, 1999). The value of comparative studies lies in its potentials in highlighting the strengths and deficiencies of the education systems being examined and thereby identifying valuable features of both foreign and local systems, as well as exposing defects for necessary improvements. Nevertheless, there has been a lack of cross-regional comparative research on IL programmes carried out via school libraries in East Asia. This study aims to provide a cross-analysis of empirical data collected in five different regions in East Asia for examining the issues of the role of the school librarians as IL skills specialists, by looking at their relationships with other colleagues as well as their role as curriculum facilitator within the school community as a whole.

The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive review on development and future trends in zinc oxide thin film transistors (ZnO TFTs). This paper presents the development of TFT technology starting from amorphous silicon, poly-Si to ZnO TFTs. This paper also discusses about transport and device modeling of ZnO TFT and provides a comparative analysis with other TFTs on the basis of performance parameters.

It highlights the need of high–k dielectrics for low leakage and low threshold voltage in ZnO TFTs. This paper also explains the effect of grain boundaries, trap densities and threshold voltage shift on the performance of ZnO TFT. Moreover, it also addresses the challenges like requirement of stable p-type ZnO semiconductor for various electronic applications and high value of ZnO mobility to meet growing demand of high-definition light emitting diode TV (HD-LED TV).

This review will motivate the readers to further investigate the conduction mechanism, best alternate for gate-dielectric and the deposition technique optimization for the enhancement of the performance of ZnO TFTs.

This is a literature review. The technological evolution of TFT in general and ZnO TFT in particular is presented in this paper.