Exploring the feasibility of applying data mining for library reference service improvement : a case study of Turku Main Library

Data mining, as a heatedly discussed term, has been studied in various fields. Its possibilities in refining the decision-making process, realizing potential patterns and creating valuable knowledge have won attention of scholars and practitioners. However, there are less studies intending to combine data mining and libraries where data generation occurs all the time. Therefore, this thesis plans to fill such a gap. Meanwhile, potential opportunities created by data mining are explored to enhance one of the most important elements of libraries: reference service. In order to thoroughly demonstrate the feasibility and applicability of data mining, literature is reviewed to establish a critical understanding of data mining in libraries and attain the current status of library reference service. The result of the literature review indicates that free online data resources other than data generated on social media are rarely considered to be applied in current library data mining mandates. Therefore, the result of the literature review motivates the presented study to utilize online free resources. Furthermore, the natural match between data mining and libraries is established. The natural match is explained by emphasizing the data richness reality and considering data mining as one kind of knowledge, an easy choice for libraries, and a wise method to overcome reference service challenges. The natural match, especially the aspect that data mining could be helpful for library reference service, lays the main theoretical foundation for the empirical work in this study. Turku Main Library was selected as the case to answer the research question: whether data mining is feasible and applicable for reference service improvement. In this case, the daily visit from 2009 to 2015 in Turku Main Library is considered as the resource for data mining. In addition, corresponding weather conditions are collected from Weather Underground, which is totally free online. Before officially being analyzed, the collected dataset is cleansed and preprocessed in order to ensure the quality of data mining. Multiple regression analysis is employed to mine the final dataset. Hourly visits are the independent variable and weather conditions, Discomfort Index and seven days in a week are dependent variables. In the end, four models in different seasons are established to predict visiting situations in each season. Patterns are realized in different seasons and implications are created based on the discovered patterns. In addition, library-climate points are generated by a clustering method, which simplifies the process for librarians using weather data to forecast library visiting situation. Then the data mining result is interpreted from the perspective of improving reference service. After this data mining work, the result of the case study is presented to librarians so as to collect professional opinions regarding the possibility of employing data mining to improve reference services. In the end, positive opinions are collected, which implies that it is feasible to utilizing data mining as a tool to enhance library reference service.

Professional service productization and its implications to knowledge transfer in internationalization processes –Case: Company X in Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian markets

As a result of globalization, two thirds of the world’s business takes place nowadays in the service sector. In line, professional service firms are growing their share of the global service production. However, saturation of the professional service sector has forced professional service firms to search for more heuristic ways to conduct business in the international markets. By leveraging effectively the firm’s professionals, a professional service firm can lower its costs to clients and simultaneously generate additional value for the company and thus gain competitive advantage. Even though the academic field has shown growing interest towards services for decades, the fields of service productization and service internationalization are heavily understudied even today. Hence, the objective of this study was to contribute to the research on professional service internationalization and productization. The study concentrated on examining the impact that productization has on knowledge sharing and leveraging in professional service firms operating internationally. The research question focused on examining what implications productization has on knowledge transfer and leveraging during professional service internationalization by leaning on the existing research and on an empirical research. The empirical research was conducted as a single case study within a professional service firm operating in debt-related administrative service business. The case company is one of the leading operators in its field of business and therefore offered a fruitful environment to observe and analyze the topics in question. Additionally, the case company has a strong international presence and a large scale of operations in the selected markets, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Based on the previous literature and on the empirical research, this study found that for professional service firms to efficiently utilize individual, tacit knowledge, in its internationalization processes, it must be shared with the whole organization. By exploiting productization as a knowledge leveraging mechanism, a PSF can apply and transfer knowledge profoundly during its internationalization processes that would otherwise be difficult to tap into. Productization might not be sufficient alone, but by complementing it with a favorable organizational structure and culture, and by encouraging open communication, a PSF may take advantage of the whole potential that productization has to offer.

Adaptability, Transformation and Complex Changes in Namibia and Tanzania: Resilience and Innovation System Development in Local Communities

This thesis is a research about the recent complex spatial changes in Namibia and Tanzania and local communities’ capacity to cope with, adapt to and transform the unpredictability engaged to these processes. I scrutinise the concept of resilience and its potential application to explaining the development of local communities in Southern Africa when facing various social, economic and environmental changes. My research is based on three distinct but overlapping research questions: what are the main spatial changes and their impact on the study areas in Namibia and Tanzania? What are the adaptation, transformation and resilience processes of the studied local communities in Namibia and Tanzania? How are innovation systems developed, and what is their impact on the resilience of the studied local communities in Namibia and Tanzania? I use four ethnographic case studies concerning environmental change, global tourism and innovation system development in Namibia and Tanzania, as well as mixed-methodological approaches, to study these issues. The results of my empirical investigation demonstrate that the spatial changes in the localities within Namibia and Tanzania are unique, loose assemblages, a result of the complex, multisided, relational and evolutional development of human and non-human elements that do not necessarily have linear causalities. Several changes co-exist and are interconnected though uncertain and unstructured and, together with the multiple stressors related to poverty, have made communities more vulnerable to different changes. The communities’ adaptation and transformation measures have been mostly reactive, based on contingency and post hoc learning. Despite various anticipation techniques, coping measures, adaptive learning and self-organisation processes occurring in the localities, the local communities are constrained by their uneven power relationships within the larger assemblages. Thus, communities’ own opportunities to increase their resilience are limited without changing the relations in these multiform entities. Therefore, larger cooperation models are needed, like an innovation system, based on the interactions of different actors to foster cooperation, which require collaboration among and input from a diverse set of stakeholders to combine different sources of knowledge, innovation and learning. Accordingly, both Namibia and Tanzania are developing an innovation system as their key policy to foster transformation towards knowledge-based societies. Finally, the development of an innovation system needs novel bottom-up approaches to increase the resilience of local communities and embed it into local communities. Therefore, innovation policies in Namibia have emphasised the role of indigenous knowledge, and Tanzania has established the Living Lab network.

The use of future-oriented knowledge in regional innovation processes: Research on knowledge generation, transfer and conversion

The importance of the regional level in research has risen in the last few decades and a vast literature in the fields of, for instance, evolutionary and institutional economics, network theories, innovations and learning systems, as well as sociology, has focused on regional level questions. Recently the policy makers and regional actors have also began to pay increasing attention to the knowledge economy and its needs, in general, and the connectivity and support structures of regional clusters in particular. Nowadays knowledge is generally considered as the most important source of competitive advantage, but even the most specialised forms of knowledge are becoming a short-lived resource for example due to the accelerating pace of technological change. This emphasizes the need of foresight activities in national, regional and organizational levels and the integration of foresight and innovation activities. In regional setting this development sets great challenges especially in those regions having no university and thus usually very limited resources for research activities. Also the research problem of this dissertation is related to the need to better incorporate the information produced by foresight process to facilitate and to be used in regional practice-based innovation processes. This dissertation is a constructive case study the case being Lahti region and a network facilitating innovation policy adopted in that region. Dissertation consists of a summary and five articles and during the research process a construct or a conceptual model for solving this real life problem has been developed. It is also being implemented as part of the network facilitating innovation policy in the Lahti region.