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The purpose of this article is to report on sessions the author attended at the 2013 ASIS&T Conference.

The approach is an informal review of sessions and events the author attended.

This report condenses the author's notes from various events and sessions at the conference.

This is an original conference report written after attending the conference.

There are an estimated 190.7 million economically active children in the world today.¹ Most of these children are living in poor countries. Sixty-four percent live in Asia where nearly 1 in 5 children work. Sub-Saharan Africa's population is much smaller, but more than 1 in 4 children are economically active. These statistics do not include the hundreds of millions more that provide unpaid household services to their families.

This paper describes a series of three evaluations of electronic textbooks on the Web, which focused on assessing how appearance and design can affect users’ sense of engagement and directness with the material. The EBONI Project's methodology for evaluating electronic textbooks is outlined and each experiment is described, together with an analysis of results. Finally, some recommendations for successful design are suggested, based on an analysis of all experimental data. These recommendations underline the main findings of the evaluations: that users want some features of paper books to be preserved in the electronic medium, while also preferring electronic text to be written in a scannable style.

The paper aims to discern, document, and analyze current staffing trends in college and university libraries.

The author gathered information from the literatures of library and information science and higher education.

The paper details six trends across public and technical services affecting librarians, non‐MLS professionals, and paraprofessionals. The presentation of trends is followed by a discussion of three concerns the author has about these trends.

The paper covers trends in college and university libraries but does not specifically address community college libraries. Community colleges may have similar issues, as well as unique trends; further research is encouraged.

Library managers will be able to compare developments in their libraries to the profession‐wide trends. They will also be able to link to a large body of literature on the topic.

This kind of comprehensive look at academic library staffing does not seem to have been published recently.

Navigation problems in a hypertext might be reduced, if multiple, coherent views of the hypertext were available. Document outlines help readers appreciate the structure and meaning of the document. We propose measures of syntactic and lexical balance in an outline and show in a sample of documents the degree to which these balances occur. Based on balance in an outline, a method for semi‐automatically generating an alternative outline is applied to one textbook. The textbook with both its original and its alternative outline is available in hypertext, and subjects who were asked to evaluate this hypertext noted that the alternative outline would help readers compare concepts in the textbook. The computer programs for generating outlines have been used in several writing tasks, including the writing of this paper.

This exploratory paper argues that there is a need to rethink the issue of black entrepreneurship in the Caribbean. It contends that part of the problem with many of the discussions on black entrepreneurship in the Caribbean is that they have tended to focus on traditional areas of entrepreneurship. This means that other categories of business – the knowledge, culture/entertainment sectors and micro and small enterprises – are often ignored in these discussions. Yet, these are areas in which Afro‐Caribbean people have, historically, established cultural spaces. Therefore, it is being suggested that there is a need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of entrepreneurial activity in these areas, and account for the reasons why black entrepreneurs have not, in larger numbers, expanded beyond their traditional cultural spaces. To do so, there is a need to enter the world of the black entrepreneur and to discover that world. It is necessary to understand his/her definition of that world, and then see how s/he perceives opportunities and barriers to entrepreneurial success. In general, this paper calls for both a methodological and theoretical shift to the way in which the study of black entrepreneurship in the Caribbean is conducted.

It has become clear that business process re‐engineering (BPR) draws on the knowledge and skills from many of the traditional management disciplines. The adoption of the process paradigm for managing enterprises creates new challenges of reconciling the relative roles of functions and processes within an organization. While these issues have yet to be resolved there are other aspects of BPR concerned with activities to improve performance which have many similarities with existing concepts and techniques in the domain of operations management. There is a danger that the learning gained in areas of quality management, just‐in‐time and simultaneous engineering may be disregarded or hidden from those engaged in BPR programmes. Aims to indicate and identify some of the lessons learned from operations management so that they may be applied to BPR.

Increase the workforce involvement in continuous improvement activities is one of the main recommendations of the recent report Rethinking Construction, developed by the UK Construction Task Force. In Brazil, this is also a major issue in most government and industry initiatives for the sector, particularly after the opening of the economy in the mid‐1980s. In this context, this research attempts to contribute to policy making by assessing the degree of workforce involvement in continuous improvement in English and Brazilian construction sites. The results show a generalised poor level of workforce involvement in comparison to the reported practices of other industrial sectors. Hence, the results suggest that current strategies for promoting continuous improvement in the construction sector are failing to bring real change at the operational level due to the lack of leadership and appropriate win‐win relationships.