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This chapter reviews significant advances in health sciences librarianship, highlighting developments between 1970 and 2005. During this time Advances in Librarianship published two chapters that dealt with health sciences librarianship. The first appeared in 1971 with volume two. Written by David Bishop (1971), then at the University of Arizona, it focused on developments in the 1960s and provided a review of the MEDLARS (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System) system, the beginnings of the regional medical library (RML) program and advances in library services and information resources. The second chapter devoted to health sciences libraries appeared in the ninth volume of Advances in Librarianship. In it Donald Hendricks (1979) from the University of New Orleans highlighted collaborative programs among health sciences libraries, the growing reliance on computer applications, professional development programs, clinical medical librarian services and the accomplishments of the Medical Library Association (MLA).

The purpose of the chapter is to engage with the relationship between the gift and the market in the context of philanthropic micro-lending. We seek to move beyond theorizing separate, ex-ante gift or market regimes and transactors who independently navigate between oppositional modes of transaction.

We turn to recent efforts of hybridizing charity and venture finance, exemplified by microfinance platforms such as Kiva.org. We combine data from an existing study of Kiva and its online community, with additional participant observation and third-party accounts detailing the evolution and workings of microfinance.

We illustrate how market-like elements are productively and problematically deployed in philanthropic giving and address the need to consider a broader range of socio-material relations involved in the framing of transactions.

A complex network of actors and (trans)actions needs to be assembled for the philanthropic loan to be enacted. We touch upon the making and role of the socio-material devices that actively participate in such enactment only tangentially. Further research is needed to flesh out the respective transaction complex, taking additional note of the work of borrowers, local loan officers, and other less visible actors.

Organizations need to recognize and creatively address the complex interplay of gift and market elements. They need to pay attention and take advantage of the tensions and synergies emergent in hybrid gift-market contexts.

We engage with a complex, less studied transaction context. The chapter shows that philanthropic gift relations can be reproduced through market-like elements and arrangements. Such production entails complex socio-material networks mobilizing a broad array of human and nonhuman actors.

This chapter examines cultural value creation through the 24 Carrot Gardens Project. Initiated by artist and curator Kirsha Kaechele of the Museum of Old and New Art, the vision of 24 Carrot Gardens is to ‘sow seeds of lifelong learning’ in the areas of health, well-being and sustainability across school communities in Tasmania, Australia. What has eventuated over its five years is a complex relationship between the artful ‘gold standard’ delivered by professional artists and a contemporary art museum with an integrated teaching and site-based learning across the arts and sciences. Designed in response to the local environmental, cultural and socio-economic context, 24 Carrot Gardens has contributed to a growing sense of community engagement, interdisciplinary learning and a strong foundation of networked donor investment. With these multilayered interests across a diversity of stakeholders and partnerships, many competing systems of value are at play, with the potential to contribute a new value creation. Firsthand accounts of project contributors are situated amongst the scholarly literature to produce an examination of value exchange and creation including the cultural values identified in 24 Carrot Gardens: artistic and creative, economic and industrial and education and environmental. Following this interrogation of the expressed values in this case study, we offer a foundation for a new framework for understanding local cultural value.