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By formulating a vision that provides for a solid foundation for the virtual library, we can dramatically improve existing library services and create new ones with added value. The new library paradigm will be built on software and hardware information technology. Related requirements include distributed computing and networking; open architectures and standards; authentication, authorization, and encryption; and billing and royalty tracking. The “virtual library tool kit” will include reduced dependence on word indexing and keyword/Boolean retrieval; development and application of natural language processing; and effective tools for navigation of networks. Carnegie Mellon University offers some helpful examples of how information technology and information retrieval may be used to build the virtual library.

Working conditions, pay rates and the rights of workers to collectively negotiate have become important points of discussions in recent years, with support for unions and union applications rising to levels long unseen in America. In many instances, though, companies have responded aggressively. This is not the first time such a dynamic has played out in American business. This study aims to take a fresh look at one of America’s most prominent historical disputes between labor and ownership – the Homestead Massacre of 1892 – to glean lessons from that conflict that remain relevant to today’s business environment.

This study adopts game theory and the principles of repeated interaction to assess how differing discount factors led to differences in time orientations between the workers and the Carnegie company. These differing time orientations affected both the strategy each side deployed in the negotiations and the payoffs received by the parties. Letters, contemporary news reports and histories of the events leading up to and immediately following the 1892 Homestead Massacre are qualitatively analyzed with a genealogical pragmatic approach.

Differences in temporal orientation between management and workers exacerbated the conflict, with the workers adopting a more cooperative stance and distal time orientation, while the Carnegie company negotiated with a proximal time orientation and played to “win” a game that, in fact, could not be fully won or lost given its infinitely repeating nature. The result was a short-term victory for the Carnegie company but with long-term negative consequences that highlight the suboptimal outcome the company achieved by playing a proximal strategy in an infinite game.

Although the incident at Homestead is a well-studied labor dispute, many of the themes that preceded the incident have resurfaced in the modern work context. This work, by adopting game theory as an analytical framework, provides new insights into management mistakes that led to the labor conflict and lessons for what present-day managers can do to avoid exacerbating labor strife.

ACCORDING to a pamphlet just issued by Mr. Thomas Greenwood, the total amount expended by Mr. Andrew Carnegie on the provision of Public Library, school, and other educational buildings is about £14,000,000 sterling. Some of this enormous amount has been devoted to the endowment of scholarships in universities, but the major part of it has been given for the purpose of enabling towns to erect library buildings. About £1,300,000 have been given to Scotland for this purpose, and probably about £50,000 to England, though this latter sum is being augmented almost daily. Mr. Carnegie's action in this matter is without precedent in the history of the world, and his extraordinary generosity and enthusiasm in this particular field of educational work deserves the heartiest recognition and applause from every section of the public. His work, so far as British libraries are concerned, is largely supplemental to the niggardly and short‐sighted policy of Parliament, which allows municipal authorities to establish Public Libraries, and raise funds which are barely sufficient in many cases to pay the gas bill and provide a few of the current magazines. Hence it follows that, in many cases, our libraries are housed in all kinds of temporary premises, from disused warehouses to prisons, churches, and market‐halls, where their utility is impaired by the complete unsuitability of their environment. Thus, about 75 per cent. of the British municipal libraries are administered under conditions which are desperate when compared with those of the United States. But worse even than the matter of equipment is that of efficient administration. Extraordinarily good work is accomplished, and great use is made of the books, in library premises which are a disgrace to the community which owns them, and to the Parliament which sanctions such makeshifts in the name of education; but this is owing more to luck in obtaining capable officers than the action of any systematic attempt to train competent staffs and improve methods of administration. Mr. Carnegie has done such a great work in making good the failure of the Legislature to provide adequately or the material side of Public Libraries, that it is not too much to suggest a practical method of making his valuable gifts even more valuable and effective. At present many of the Carnegie libraries are object‐lessons in what to avoid in library administration. They are staffed by untrained men, whose methods are the laughing‐stock of the more competent American librarians, whose opinions Mr. Carnegie is bound to respect in view of his belief in everything American. They are classified in a manner which would prove ruinous in any business run for profit, and catalogued in such a painfully bald manner as to reduce the whole method of book‐selection to the level of a lottery. We could name libraries in Scotland, which have been lavishly helped by Mr. Carnegie, which are doing greatly inferior work to little municipal libraries elsewhere, which are not even decently housed. They have not adopted a single modern or scientific method of doing anything, and they have been officered in a manner which will prevent any possibility of improvement for years to come. Other instances could be given of libraries housed in fine buildings which are simply libels on the aims and objects of modern librarianship, but enough has been said in a general way to show that something more is required to make Public Libraries efficient than good homes, or even a penny rate. How this could in part be accomplished, it is the purpose of this article to try and show.

SO much interest has been aroused by our Editorial in the July number of The Library World, that we have decided to open a discussion of the project by all librarians who may be interested in the subject. As will be gathered from the communications printed below, the proposal which we made has been received with favour, namely :—That, in order to secure the full value of his magnificent endowed libraries for the public benefit, Mr. Andrew Carnegie should follow his action of creating numerous libraries to a logical conclusion by establishing a College of Librarianship, from which competent officers could be obtained to organise and manage his libraries. Indeed, it is the only practical solution of the difficulty which must presently arise, unless it is Mr. Carnegie's desire that local authorities be left as heretofore, to appoint as librarians any political or local pet who happens to be in the ascendency at the moment.

Ponders on whether Abraham Flexner was responsible for the change in medical education in North America in the early 20th century, owing to his report of 1910. Tries to demonstrate that medical education in the USA was part of a greater whole of major changes at that time. Concludes, though there was a philanthropic influence, Flexner (who refused to accept credit for change) was not the father of the medical reform plan.

The purpose of this study is to explain how library and information science (LIS) with a focus on libraries, librarians and LIS associations, developed into becoming a racist institution that supports white supremacy. The central argument is that a philanthropic organization, the Carnegie Foundation, which led the eugenics movement, captured LIS and with the assistance of the American Library Association (ALA), created a library ecosystem that was structurally racist in order to maintain the power of the elites. This study is an exegetical analysis that is explored through the lens of a Christian spirituality conceptual framework. Some tentative solutions to remedy this problem are suggested.

The purpose of this paper is to outline a reconceptualised view of public education, with specific reference to early twentieth-century Australia, and to revisit the significance of the Carnegie Corporation of New York in this period. Further, in this regard, the paper proposes a neo-Foucaultian notion of philanthropic power, as an explanatory and analytical principle, with possible implications for thinking anew about the role and influence of American philanthropic organisations in the twentieth century.

The paper draws on mainly secondary sources but also works with primary sources gathered from relevant archives, including that of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER).

The paper concludes that the larger possibilities associated with the particular view of public education outlined here, referring to both public school and public libraries, were constrained by the emergence and consolidation of an increasingly professionalised view of education and schooling.

The influence of the Carnegie Corporation of New York on early twentieth-century Australian education has been increasingly acknowledged and documented in recent historical research. More recently, Carnegie has been drawn into an interdisciplinary perspective on philanthropy and public culture in Australia. This paper seeks to add to such work by looking at schools and libraries as interconnected yet loosely coupled aspects of what can be understood as, in effect, a re-conceived public education, to a significant degree sponsored by the Corporation.

The paper draws upon but seeks to extend and to some extent re-orient existing historical research on the relationship between Australian education and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Its originality lies in its exploration of a somewhat different view of public education and the linkage it suggests in this regard with a predominantly print-centric public culture in Australia, in the first half of the twentieth century.

THE ANCIENT and royal burgh of Stirling, at one time the capital of Scotland, was at the turn of the century the county town of Stirlingshire and the centre of a thriving agricultural community. With the exception of a carpet and woollen mill and some neighbouring coal mines, there was little industry in the town. This was reflected in its social structure. There was growing up in the village of Raploch, beneath the castle rock, a sizeable Irish community of labourers and artisans, but of a population of around 20,000 in 1900, middle class businessmen and shopkeepers predominated. The town's structure in turn was reflected in the nature of the Town Council, which, although not always conservative in politics, was generally conservative when faced with innovation, be it a swimming pool or a modern town centre. This might explain why in Stirling the public library movement was late in starting, nearly 25 years after the Public Libraries (Scotland) Act of 1870 authorising the use for library purposes of 1 d. in the £ from the rates. It might also explain why there was some opposition from the Town Council to providing for the upkeep of the library after its foundation.

IN JANUARY 1899 an advertisement appeared in the national daily newspapers, including the Manchester Guardian, the Leeds Mercury, the Birmingham Post and the Standard: ‘Wanted a competent man as Chief Librarian and Secretary, Salary £100 per annum. Copies of testimonials and particulars as to character, ability and experience to be sent to Hon. Secretary of the Stanley Library, Town Hall, King's Lynn, on or before the 27th inst.’