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The purpose of this paper is to examine a pilot program implemented by the Houston Academy of Medicine‐Texas Medical Center Library and The University of Texas School of Nursing at Houston to design the multi‐institutional repository for the Texas Medical Center.

The steps involved in the program are outlined and the lessons learned from the implementation are analyzed.

The success of the institutional repository depends on appropriate communication with faculty, a deep understanding of the publishing process, identifying appropriate partners, designing a flexible technology infrastructure, and engaging in active collaboration with key players. The Library is the logical center for this activity.

The paper should assist libraries with the unique activities involved in creating a viable multi‐institutional repository in a research‐intense academic medical environment.

This paper analyzes the challenges inherent in introducing institutional digital repositories to the academic medical community. Currently, institutional repositories are being developed in only a small percentage of the academic medical centers in the USA.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a solution to the challenges of professional service firms (PSF), which are referred to as cat herding, opaque quality and lack of process standardization. These result from misalignment in the mental pictures that managers, employees and customers have of the service. The study demonstrates how the process of articulating a shared service concept reduces these challenges.

A narrative methodology is used to analyze the perspectives of old management, new management and employees during organizational change in a PSF – a website design company growing to offer full-service branding. Group narratives are constructed using longitudinal data gathered through interviews and fieldwork, in order to compare the misaligned mental pictures and show the benefits of articulating the service concept.

Professional employees view growth and change as threats to their culture and practice, particularly when new management seeks to standardize processes. These threats are revealed to stem from misinterpretations caused by miscommunication of intentions and lack of participation in decision making. Articulating a shared service concept helps to align understanding and return the firm to equilibrium.

The narrative methodology helps unpack conflicting perspectives, but is open to claims of subjectivity and misrepresentation. To ensure fairness and trustworthiness, informants were invited to review and approve the narratives.

The study contributes propositions related to the value of articulating a shared service concept as a means of minimizing the challenges of PSFs.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds his/her own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Can a community have a strategy? For those who work in business and read about, design and enact strategy on a daily basis, one would suspect that could have two very distinct answers to this question. The first camp would nod in agreement, and agree that almost any person or group can benefit from having a strategy, although they may not be clear on what that could look like for any given community. On the other hand, it is also easy to imagine a second group shaking their head dismissively, saying that without a clear purpose, vision and hierarchy any such idea would be like herding cats and, therefore, doomed to failure.

This paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world’s leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

The author suggests we know a lot less about learning than we normally admit – in fact there is no generally accepted definition of what it is. He suggests that this is a big problem with designing so‐called e‐Learning, most of which is really just "e‐Teaching." There is a need, the author argues, for much more differentiation of learning, especially by type of material to be learned. Much of the available research on learning is not about how people learn, but about how they learn in groups – i.e. classes, or, as the author calls them, herds. "Herding" introduces all sort of learning problems, and, to be successful, any e‐Learning must take one‐on‐one tutoring, which is two standard deviations more effective than classroom teaching – as its base.

In higher education, translating institutional objectives into meaningful action is a challenging task, particularly given the currency attached to analogies such as the view that managing academics is akin to herding cats, or that teaching in HE is one of the last cottage industries. Yet alignment is becoming increasingly important, as the reports of national inquiries and commissions (e.g. Dearing, West, Boyer) and the pronouncements and plans of governments indicate. The paper examines one illustration of steps that an institution has taken to translate objectives into action.

This paper aims at examining the prospects and possibilities of autoethnography in trust research. The focus of this study is on trust-building in a management team from an esthetic leadership perspective. The empirical context of the study is the organization of higher education during a funding reform.

This study adopted a qualitative research strategy with co-produced autoethnographic methods. The data comprised the researcher's diary, field notes and written texts from informants. Autoethnographic methods were applied in data gathering; more precisely, the data were collected by the moving observing method of shadowing and complemented with the management team's written texts reporting their feelings. The data were analyzed by constructing autoethnographic vignettes and a critical frame story.

The findings of the study contribute to the methodological discussion of autoethnographic research when studying a complex phenomenon such as trust-building. The findings suggest that the role of authenticity in trust-building may vary depending on the esthetic leadership style. Furthermore, the findings contribute to the esthetic leadership theory by a proposal of esthetic reassurance as intentional leader-embodied communication aiming to reinforce follower trust in a leader.

Co-produced autoethnography is applied in studying trust-building. Furthermore, this paper provides an inside view of the meaning of esthetics in leader-follower relationships in higher education organizations.

This column aims to explore the important issue of developing native skills in the library profession in order to develop and maintain library applications.

Discusses the issue of developing native skills in the library profession in order to develop and maintain library applications.

This column is simply exploratory, and examines issues surrounding the utility and cost effectiveness of library developed software and the issue of related professional skills.

In order to prepare for the future and take the tools necessary to perform library work in the twenty‐first century, professional librarians and library staff members need to seriously evaluate their skill sets.

This column provides points of discussion for professional librarians and library staff concerning the issue of the skill sets required to develop and maintain library related software in order to meet the increasing demands of our patrons.

The aim of this paper is to describe the Rosarium Project which is currently curating nonfiction materials about the genus Rosa written at the turn of the twentieth century and published in popular American periodicals. This is achieved by encoding the texts following the guidelines set forth by the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium (TEI).

This paper explains what text encoding is and why following the guidelines set forth by the TEI Consortium was the best choice for the Rosarium Project. It then goes on to outline the workflow and choices made by the principal researcher which are needed to move the project steadily forward.

The principal researcher on the Rosarium Project has found that encoding with the TEI was easy to learn and fun to do, as well as intellectually stimulating. Librarians should find text-encoding projects of their own specialist subjects equally doable.

The Rosarium Project is unique, in that it is curating early twentieth century articles on the subject of roses that appeared in popular magazines. These materials are hidden away in online repositories and libraries worldwide. This project is of value, in that it provides primary sources to researchers in areas of popular culture, horticulture and garden history and also acts as an example of what librarians can contribute to the Digital Humanities.