Library work often involves coordinating projects with many tasks and many stakeholders where cost and time limitations can be seen as opportunities. Effective project management is worth learning!This book provides library staffers at every level--whether in public, academic, school or special libraries--with the basic tools of project management so that they can gain confidence and an expectation of success. Part I covers the terminology, the philosophy, the resource management a...

The sustainability of cultural organisations and their positioning in contemporary society are increasingly relevant topics among practitioners and scholars interested in the cultural field. Foundations, research centers, but also libraries and museums are under pressure to seek a balance between tradition and new challenges of modernity. Therefore, they need to rethink their role by developing new and more effective tools to reaffirm their fundamental function. This e-book presents the re...

This book is an introduction to health care as a complex adaptive system, a system that feeds back on itself. The first section introduces systems and complexity theory from a science, historical, epistemological, and technical perspective, describing the principles and mathematics. Subsequent sections build on the health applications of systems science theory, from human physiology to medical decision making, population health and health services research. The aim of the book is to introd...

Following on from the first edition of this book, the second edition fills the gap between more complex theoretical texts and those books with a purely practical approach. The book looks at major library classification schemes in use in Europe, UK and the USA, and includes practical exercises to demonstrate their application. Importantly, classifying electronic resources is also discussed. Classification in Theory and Practice aims to demystify a very complex subject, and to provide a soun...

Today, our cities are an embodiment of the complex, historical evolution of knowledge, desires and technology. Our planned and designed activities co-evolve with our aspirations, mediated by the existing technologies and social structures. The city represents the accretion and accumulation of successive layers of collective activity, structuring and being structured by other, increasingly distant cities, reaching now right around the globe.This historical and structural development...

Microsoft Excel is a powerful tool that can transform the way you use data. This book explains in comprehensive and user-friendly detail how to manage, make sense of, explore and share data, giving scientists at all levels the skills they need to maximize the usefulness of their data.Readers will learn how to use Excel to:* Build a dataset – how to handle variables and notes, rearrangements and edits to data.* Check datasets – dealing with typographic errors, data val...

Nonlinear Model Predictive Control is a thorough and rigorous introduction to nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) for discrete-time and sampled-data systems. NMPC is interpreted as an approximation of infinite-horizon optimal control so that important properties like closed-loop stability, inverse optimality and suboptimality can be derived in a uniform manner. These results are complemented by discussions of feasibility and robustness. NMPC schemes with and without stabilizing termi...

Most people think of libraries as solemn places filled with dusty books and dustier people. This "memoir and more" of a career librarian explodes that misconception. Recounting his years behind the reference desk with an emphasis on the strange behavior of patrons, the author shows that public libraries are anything but staid and quiet. The history of libraries--as long as the history of the written word itself--is also discussed. That libraries have grown as colorful as the society they s...

Volume 32 of Advances in Library Administration and Organization brings together a collection of studies which highlight up and coming issues that today's library managers and researchers face. The book will examine the challenges that library administrators encounter on a daily basis, review emerging trends and bring critical analysis to this area of Library and Information Science.

Computational and mathematical models provide us with the opportunities to investigate the complexities of real world problems. They allow us to apply our best analytical methods to define problems in a clearly mathematical manner and exhaustively test our solutions before committing expensive resources. This is made possible by assuming parameter(s) in a bounded environment, allowing for controllable experimentation, not always possible in live scenarios. For example, simulation of comput...

The telling of stories lies at the heart of human communication. In this important new book Peter Brophy introduces and explains the concept of story-telling or narrative-based practice in teaching, research, professional practice and organizations. He illustrates the deficiencies in evidence-based practice models, which focus on quantitative rather than qualitative evidence, and highlights the importance of narrative by drawing on insights from fields as disparate as pedagogy, anthropolog...

In this unique book the author explores the history of pioneering computer art and its contribution to art history by way of examining Ernest Edmonds’ art from the late 1960s to the present day. Edmonds’ inventions of new concepts, tools and forms of art, along with his close involvement with the communities of computer artists, constructive artists and computer technologists, provides the context for discussion of the origins and implications of the relationship between art and technology...