Search results

Seeking legal advice today can be extremely costly, and Legal Aid is generally only available to the least well‐off members of society. But a special legal advisory service has been set up aimed at employers or groups of individuals. Our correspondent explains.

The news that the Ministry of Education has set up two Working Parties in connection with the proposed new Public Libraries Bill is welcome and gives further hope that such a Bill will appear in the not too distant future. From the constitutions of these Working Parties, which seem to us to be fairly representative of all interests, it would appear that the first is going to concern itself with the main aspects of the Roberts Report recommendations, while the second will be given the task of studying the problems of library co‐operation. On the first party, county libraries are represented by Miss Paulin and Mr. Budge, while Wales is represented by Mr. A. Edwards, librarian of the Cardiganshire and Aberystwyth Joint Library. Mr. D. I. Colley, the city librarian of Manchester, will be keeping a watching brief on behalf of the large libraries, but it should not be forgotten that he is also a member of the Libraries Committee of the Association of Municipal Corporations. Mr. Gardner is rightly there, perhaps not only as librarian of Luton but also as chairman of the Library Association's Executive Committee. The Smaller Libraries Group can surely have no complaints, for out of the ten members of Working Party No. I there are three librarians from smaller libraries, these being Mr. Helliwell of Winchester, Mr. Christopher of Penge and Mr. Parker of Ilkley. This Working Party is completed by two legal representatives in Mr. W. B. Murgatroyd, who is Town Clerk of Hornsey, and Mr. J. H. Oldham, who is Assistant County Solicitor for Kent.

As announced in the May issue of Hybrid Circuits, ISHM‐Benelux is organising a one‐day conference on applications of hybrid circuit technology.

THIS is the time of the year when, with the strong opening of the Spring publishing season, librarians take a review of matters which definitely concern books. There is a cant saying amongst certain eager librarians that their colleagues are too concerned with technical matters and too little, if at all, concerned with books. There may have been isolated cases of this kind, but it is merely untrue to say that the average librarian is not concerned, deeply and continuously, with the literary activity of his day. It is well that men should live in their own time and be thoroughly interested in the work of new writers. There is danger that exclusive occupation with them may lead to an unbalanced view of the book world. If one judged from the criticisms that occasionally appear in our contemporaries, one would suppose that the only books that mattered were the authentic fiction of the day, and by authentic is meant the books which go beyond average contemporary thought and conventions. Librarianship, however, is concerned with all books of all subjects and of all time. This note is merely a prelude to a number of THE LIBRARY WORLD which deals mainly with literature and with reading. Here we return again to the perennial fiction question.

Under which conditions do social movements receive extensive attention from the mainstream news media? We develop an institutional mediation model that argues that combinations of the news-heightening characteristics of movements, including their disruptive capacities, organizational resources, and political orientation, and political contexts, including partisan regimes and benefiting from national policies, bring extensive attention to movements. It also holds that investigations will draw extensive media attention to movements, and those that have achieved prominence in the news will remain prominent under specific conditions. We appraise these combinational arguments by examining 29 social movements across 100 years in four national newspapers using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). Researchers typically use QCA to study the consequences of movements when they hypothesize outcomes to result from multiple combinations of conditions. This raises our second main question: How should scholars best address combinational hypotheses using QCA? Here we employ Venn diagrams to identify and illustrate key analytical issues and anomalies, including constrained diversity in observational data, empirical instances when combinations of conditions do not produce the expected outcome, and instances when unexpected combinations of conditions produce a consistent result. We also demonstrate the value of broad comparisons across movements and over time in these analyses.

The central place that education has in the strength and well-being of any profession is widely accepted. Australia presents an interesting case study of a country where Library and Information Studies (LIS) education moved from being conducted by practitioners under the guidance of the professional association to being provided in institutions of higher education in 1959. The 50 years (1959–2008) saw substantial changes in Australian LIS education with a rapid proliferation of schools which was later followed by closures, mergers and changes of focus. This chapter charts LIS education during this period focusing on organizational and structural aspects of the placement of LIS education in tertiary institutions, on the academization of LIS educators who had in the early days mainly been drawn from practice, and on the development of LIS educators as academic researchers and authors as represented by their productivity and visibility in national and international databases. In addition to giving an account of these areas of LIS education over the 50 years, the chapter seeks to offer explanations for what has occurred and some views of strategies which may assist the development of LIS education in Australia and in other countries which possess similar characteristics.

The purpose of this paper was to investigate how recordkeepers in Canada, Finland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Iceland and Italy experienced accomplishing their tasks from home over varying lengths of time during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A multilingual survey including 44 questions was designed and administered to the six countries identified above in 2022. This research was preceded by an environmental scan looking at existing studies considering archival and records management responses to the pandemic.

The impact of working from home on recordkeeping and, more generally, work performance was perceived differently by the survey respondents depending on various factors. The study also identified a number of similarities across countries, such as an increased awareness of the importance of records management shared by organizational actors. Surprisingly, the pandemic did not appear to have a great impact on the perceived quality of records management.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study aiming to capture records professionals’ perceptions of their role while working from home during the pandemic.

After war, societies can undergo change that extends justice to formerly excluded groups. Using theories of moral exclusion and moral inclusion as a lens, this chapter examines societal change in two consecutive periods after the American Civil War (1861–1865): Reconstruction and Jim Crow. Focusing on the well being of black Americans in the American South, this chapter examines Reconstruction's inclusionary gains and setbacks. It then describes challenges faced by black Americans during Jim Crow, a period of white supremacy and violence, and factors associated with Jim Crow's decline. Applying social psychological theory to these historical periods offers insight into the dynamics of inclusionary and exclusionary change.

This paper seeks to extend the development of the historical accounting research agenda further into the area of popular culture. The work examines the discourses that surrounded the drinking of alcohol in nineteenth century Britain and explores how an accounting failure disrupted the tension between the two established competing discourses, leading to a significant impact on UK drinking culture at the end of the nineteenth century.

The paper employs both primary and secondary sources. Secondary sources are used to develop the main themes of the discourses deployed by the temperance societies and the whisky companies. Primary sources derived from the contemporary press are employed, as necessary, in support.

The paper demonstrates that accounting, although it may not be central to a discourse or other social structure, can still have a profound impact upon cultural practices. The potential for research into culture and accounting should not therefore be dismissed if no immediate or concrete relationship between culture and accounting can be determined. Further support is provided for studies that seek to expand the accounting research agenda into new territories.

The study of popular culture is relatively novel in accounting research. This paper seeks to add to this research by exploring an area of cultural activity that has hitherto been neglected by researchers, i.e. by exploring how an accounting incident impacted upon the historical consumption of Scotch whisky in the UK.