Digital resources and their role in advanced service provision:a VRIN analysis

Purpose: We examine the role of digital resources in the context of advanced service provision to determine their strategic potential. Approach: We conduct a theoretical review of the literature to identify digital resources which we subsequently analyse with regards to their value, rarity, inimitability and non-substitutability (VRIN). Findings: Our analysis shows that the strategic value of the digital resources is unlocked through their complementarity. Value: The research has implications for the management of advanced services and contributes towards the grounding of servitization research in the wider economic and management theory.

A framework for automated construction of resource space based on background knowledge

Resource Space Model is a kind of data model which can effectively and flexibly manage the digital resources in cyber-physical system from multidimensional and hierarchical perspectives. This paper focuses on constructing resource space automatically. We propose a framework that organizes a set of digital resources according to different semantic dimensions combining human background knowledge in WordNet and Wikipedia. The construction process includes four steps: extracting candidate keywords, building semantic graphs, detecting semantic communities and generating resource space. An unsupervised statistical language topic model (i.e., Latent Dirichlet Allocation) is applied to extract candidate keywords of the facets. To better interpret meanings of the facets found by LDA, we map the keywords to Wikipedia concepts, calculate word relatedness using WordNet's noun synsets and construct corresponding semantic graphs. Moreover, semantic communities are identified by GN algorithm. After extracting candidate axes based on Wikipedia concept hierarchy, the final axes of resource space are sorted and picked out through three different ranking strategies. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework can organize resources automatically and effectively.©2013 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Online digital special collections in English universities: promoting awareness

Cultural institutions in the UK are repositories of a wealth of historical material. The scholarly importance of such resources is at the basis of the numerous digitisation projects aimed at widening their access worldwide. The lack of national policies has left those institutions alone in engaging in dissemination activities and in raising awareness of their own online material. Of particular interest to the author are the digital special collections hosted in the English Universities. The main activities of these institutions differ from others, such as museums, archives and public libraries, as they do not have the main institutional duties of preserving and the exploiting of their holdings. This article highlights related issues and suggests some of the possible measures to effectively promote and disseminate universities’ online digital special collections.

Online digital special collections in English universities: promoting awareness

Cultural institutions in the UK are repositories of a wealth of historical material. The scholarly importance of such resources is at the basis of the numerous digitisation projects aimed at widening their access worldwide. The lack of national policies has left those institutions alone in engaging in dissemination activities and in raising awareness of their own online material. Of particular interest to the author are the digital special collections hosted in the English Universities. The main activities of these institutions differ from others, such as museums, archives and public libraries, as they do not have the main institutional duties of preserving and the exploiting of their holdings. This article highlights related issues and suggests some of the possible measures to effectively promote and disseminate universities’ online digital special collections.