It is often claimed that managers do not read serious research papers in journals. If true, this neglect would seem to pose a problem because journals are the dominant source of knowledge in management science. By examining results from the forecasting principles project, which was designed to summarize all useful knowledge in forecasting, we found that journals have provided 89 percent of the useful knowledge. However, journal papers relevant to practice are difficult to find because fewer than three percent of papers on forecasting contain useful findings. That turns out to be about one useful paper per month over the last halfcentury. Once found, the papers are difficult to interpret. Managers need low-cost, easily accessible sources that summarize advice (principles) from research; journals do not meet this need. To increase the rate of progress in developing and communicating principles, researchers, journal editors, textbook writers, software developers, web site designers, and practitioners should make some changes. Some examples: Researchers should directly study forecasting principles. Journal editors should actively solicit papers -invited submissions were about 20 times better than standard submissions at producing useful findings that were often cited, and does so at a lower cost. Web-site and software developers should provide practitioners with low-cost ways to use principles. Practitioners should apply the principles that are currently available.

Desktop videoconferencing, bringing together computing, multimedia and telecommunications, is one of many new technologies competing for our attention. Videoconferencing is being used in corporations as a substitute for business travel and in academic institutions as the basis for distance learning. The Center for Business Information and the Goizueta Business School at Emory University beta tested desktop videoconferencing as a means to deliver a distance reference service, including consultation, documentation, and training and sharing of CDROM databases. This paper provides a brief overview of the technology, describes the Emory beta tests, and discusses evaluative factors necessary for the success of desk videoconferencing in a library or information centre.

This article surveys academic business librarians throughout the world and explores similarities and differences among library managers and non-managers and U.S. and international librarians. Although the survey was originally designed to measure age and gender and ethnic diversity, it was expanded to include other demographic characteristic such as education and time in the field, current skills and future competencies, hiring patterns, and professional development. Survey results are compared with other existing demographic data and with previous surveys. Major results show that U.S. library managers are significantly older and more likely to be male than other groups in our survey.

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In the six years since I first researched university research rankings and bibliometrics, much of the world suffered an economic downturn that has impacted research funding and open access journals, research institution repositories and selfpublished material on the web have opened up access to scholarly output and led to new terminology and output measurements. University rankings have expanded beyond the national end-user consumer market to a research area of global interest for scientometric scholars. Librarians supporting scholarly research have an obligation to understand the background, metrics, sources and the rankings to provide advice to their researchers and their institutions.This chapter updates an article in Taiwan