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The recruitment of undergraduate students within English universities is of vital importance to both the academic success and the financial stability of the organisation. Despite the primacy of the task, there has been a dearth of research looking at related performance and how to ensure that the process is optimised. The purpose of this study was to investigate the degree of variation both within a university and between different universities. The reliance that individual programmes and/or universities place on the Clearing process is key; given its uncertainty, resource demands and timing shortly before students take up their places.

The Nomogramma di Gandy diagrammatical approach utilises readily available data to analyse universities’ performance in recruiting students to different programmes, and the degree to which they each rely of the Clearing process. Inter-university performance was investigated on a whole-student intake basis for a sample of English universities, representative of type and region.

The study found that there were disparate patterns for the many programmes within the pilot university and also disparate patterns between different types of universities across England. Accordingly, universities should internally benchmark their programmes to inform both strategic and tactical decision-making. Similarly, Universities and Colleges Admissions Service benchmarking inter-university patterns could inform the overall sector.

The approach and findings provide lessons for analysing student recruitment which could be critical to universities’ academic and financial health, in an increasingly competitive environment.

Historically, the Further Education (FE) sector has always occupied the hinterland between the policy-heavy landscape that characterises the compulsory education sector and the fiercely independent Higher Education sector. Originally formed to give those who had not fully benefitted from their school education the opportunity to learn new skills and to be given a ‘second chance’, it gradually evolved into something that encompassed a far wider purpose of widening participation in education and also the promotion of social mobility. Because of this, the educational imperative has always featured strongly within the sector.

Recently this has been challenged by a shift to a more market-based approach that stresses neoliberalism, competition between providers and an economic imperative which can conflict with the original aims of the sector.

The sector has also increasingly been used to deliver government priorities, and given the quixotic nature of much of education policy, this has meant that the sector is required to be agile and responsive to a multitude of challenges. The colleges used as the two case studies in this chapter show that while it is important to ensure that the external metrics are met, if funding is available, then it is still possible to balance the educational imperative with the economic imperative with clear leadership and a strict focus on the college’s vision for their role within the sector. This means that the widening participation agenda can still be met, even if numerous barriers are put in the way.

Widening participation (WP) has increasingly become part of the normal ‘business’ of English higher education (HE) providers during the last 25 years. WP entered the policy mainstream for the entire HE sector following the Dearing Review (NCIHE, 1997) and the election of a new Labour government wedded to notions of social justice but also concerned with ‘lifelong learning’ in the name of human capital growth. This book employs a dual usage of the term ‘business’ in relation to WP policy, practice and culture in the context of the marketised English HE system. The first, figurative, usage explores the ways in which WP has been drawn into institutional positionality as HE providers are encouraged to differentiate themselves in the market. The second, literal, usage explores the ways in which the business of WP has become ‘business as normal’ for the sector and institutions, increasingly intertwined with other activities and which play out variously, often in response to regulatory demands of the state. This introductory chapter first contextualises these developments with a brief overview of the evolution of the HE sector in England before proposing a multilevel model – the HE policy enactment staircase – as a way of thinking about how policy is made, enacted and implemented within the sector. This chapter then draws upon this model to acts as a structure for this book. It does this by moving from a macro-level exploration of ideological levels of policymaking, through National/Sectoral level right down to the issues at an institutional and operational levels. In doing so, this chapter creates a framework from which to understand how the various elements and levels of the business of WP play out within the English HE sector.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

This study aims to investigate the perceptions of academic librarians regarding research data services (RDS) in academic library environments. This study also examines a range of challenges in RDS from the perspectives of academic librarians.

A nationwide online survey was administered to academic librarians engaged in data services at research universities around the USA. The collected survey responses were analyzed quantitatively using descriptive statistics, hierarchical clustering and multidimensional scaling.

Academic librarians perceived that consultation services would be more valuable to users than technical services in offering RDS. Accordingly, skills associated with consultation services such as instructional skills and data management planning were perceived by participants to be more important. The results revealed that academic libraries would need to seek collaboration opportunities with other units on campus to develop and offer RDS, especially technical services.

This study contributes to the existing body of research on the topic of data services in research universities. The study investigated various types of specific professional competencies and used clustering analysis to identify closely associated groups of service types. In addition, this study comprehensively examined both relevant resources for and barriers to RDS.

The research paper aims to study dissatisfaction of teleworking employees in Spain during the Covid-19 health pandemic in order to propose three models: sociodemographic profile of the teleworking dissatisfied employee; advantages and disadvantages for the teleworking dissatisfied employee and advantages for the teleworking dissatisfied employee.

This study uses official open data obtained from the Spanish National Statistical Institute (INE, 2022) through Decision Trees statistical multivariable models implementing Classification and Regression Trees and Recursive Partitioning and Regression Trees techniques to determine the variables that can influence the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of the subjects.

This investigation offers three models with two sociodemographic profiles of dissatisfied teleworking employee, who is a high/middle-level manager/employee around 45 years old, and she/he lives with the partner. Regarding the most important advantage of teleworking, employees consider “use/saving of time” and as disadvantage “worse organization and coordination of work”.

This research provides empirical evidence with inductive reasoning on understanding the challenges of teleworking dissatisfied employees in Spain not only in turbulent times but also in “normalcy” to improve overall teleworker well-being and accomplish company’s and organization’s long-term objectives for better productivity and effectivity. The study has high practical value due to the integral approach incorporating dissatisfaction as a driver that can trigger negative behaviours towards the organizations and that is seldom addressed in the literature. Additionally, this paper could provide some new ideas for accomplishing “Spain Digital 2025” and “Europe’s Digital Decade: 2030” plans on institutional level.

Upcycling is conceptualised as a digital historical research practice aimed at increasing the scientific value of historical data collections produced in print or in electronic form between the eighteenth and the late twentieth centuries. The concept of upcycling facilitates data rescue and reuse as well as the study of information creation processes deployed by previous generations of researchers.

Based on a selection of two historical reference works and two legacy collections, an upcycling workflow consisting of three parts (input, processing and documentation and output) is developed. The workflow facilitates the study of historical information creation processes based on paradata analysis and targets the cognitive processes that precede and accompany the creation of historical data collections.

The proposed upcycling workflow furthers the understanding of computational methods and their role in historical research. Through its focus on the information creation processes that precede and accompany historical research, the upcycling workflow contributes to historical data criticism and digital hermeneutics.

Many historical data collections produced between the eighteenth and the late twentieth century do not comply with the principles of FAIR data. The paper argues that ignoring the work of previous generations of researchers is not an option, because it would make current research practices more vulnerable and would result in losing access to the experiences and knowledge accumulated by previous generations of scientists. The proposed upcycling workflow takes historical data collections seriously and makes them available for future generations of researchers.

By mapping-out the capabilities, challenges and limitations of named-entity recognition (NER), this article aims to synthesise the state of the art of NER in the context of the early modern research field and to inform discussions about the kind of resources, methods and directions that may be pursued to enrich the application of the technique going forward.

Through an extensive literature review, this article maps out the current capabilities, challenges and limitations of NER and establishes the state of the art of the technique in the context of the early modern, digitally augmented research field. It also presents a new case study of NER research undertaken by Enlightenment Architectures: Sir Hans Sloane's Catalogues of his Collections (2016–2021), a Leverhulme funded research project and collaboration between the British Museum and University College London, with contributing expertise from the British Library and the Natural History Museum.

Currently, it is not possible to benchmark the capabilities of NER as applied to documents of the early modern period. The authors also draw attention to the situated nature of authority files, and current conceptualisations of NER, leading them to the conclusion that more robust reporting and critical analysis of NER approaches and findings is required.

This article examines NER as applied to early modern textual sources, which are mostly studied by Humanists. As addressed in this article, detailed reporting of NER processes and outcomes is not necessarily valued by the disciplines of the Humanities, with the result that it can be difficult to locate relevant data and metrics in project outputs. The authors have tried to mitigate this by contacting projects discussed in this paper directly, to further verify the details they report here.

The authors suggest that a forum is needed where tools are evaluated according to community standards. Within the wider NER community, the MUC and ConLL corpora are used for such experimental set-ups and are accompanied by a conference series, and may be seen as a useful model for this. The ultimate nature of such a forum must be discussed with the whole research community of the early modern domain.

NER is an algorithmic intervention that transforms data according to certain rules-, patterns- or training data and ultimately affects how the authors interpret the results. The creation, use and promotion of algorithmic technologies like NER is not a neutral process, and neither is their output A more critical understanding of the role and impact of NER on early modern documents and research and focalization of some of the data- and human-centric aspects of NER routines that are currently overlooked are called for in this paper.

This article presents a state of the art snapshot of NER, its applications and potential, in the context of early modern research. It also seeks to inform discussions about the kinds of resources, methods and directions that may be pursued to enrich the application of NER going forward. It draws attention to the situated nature of authority files, and current conceptualisations of NER, and concludes that more robust reporting of NER approaches and findings are urgently required. The Appendix sets out a comprehensive summary of digital tools and resources surveyed in this article.

This article describes the interviews the authors conducted in late 2021 with 19 researchers at the Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies at the University of Bologna. The main purpose was to shed light on the definition of the word “data” in the humanities domain, as far as FAIR data management practices are concerned, and on what researchers think of the term.

The authors invited one researcher for each of the official disciplinary areas represented within the department and all 19 accepted to participate in the study. Participants were then divided into five main research areas: philology and literary criticism, language and linguistics, history of art, computer science and archival studies. The interviews were transcribed and analysed using a grounded theory approach.

A list of 13 research data types has been compiled thanks to the information collected from participants. The term “data” does not emerge as especially problematic, although a good deal of confusion remains. Looking at current research management practices, methodologies and teamwork appear more central than previously reported.

Our findings confirm that “data” within the FAIR framework should include all types of inputs and outputs humanities research work with, including publications. Also, the participants of this study appear ready for a discussion around making their research data FAIR: they do not find the terminology particularly problematic, while they rely on precise and recognised methodologies, as well as on sharing and collaboration with colleagues.