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Japanese companies are successfully operating in other countries but foreign companies operating in Japan have not been as successful. An exception to this experience is the insurer, American Family Life Assurance Corporation (AFLAC), headquartered in Columbus, Georgia, USA. Over 75 per cent of its revenues are generated in Japan. Nevertheless, when AFLAC′s chief information officer initiated a joint development information systems project with AFLAC′s Japan branch, he faced many difficulties. Moving to Japan to facilitate this project, he finds the management process perplexing in terms of communication, office politics, and cultural differences. Since information‐systems work involves teamwork, working with these differences is essential to multinational corporations.

A new executive role has emerged, the chief information officer or CIO. Five successful CIOs in five different industry types agreed to be observed for one work week each. Perhaps the most important shared characteristic among these successful information executives was their use of figurative or metaphorical language. Anecdotes illustrating this particularly effective form of communication are provided from each of the five environments: insurance, university, manufacturing, government agency, and utilities. The ability to read ongoing situations from others′ perspective seemed to enable the CIOs to use metaphorical language more effectively. In turn, seeking the appropriate metaphor or analogy seemed to sharpen their ability to read situations from others′ perspective.

This is a brief study of the character, and the professional career, of one of the most spectacular and prolific of all the huge medley of book‐publishers in Victorian London. George Smith is perhaps today somewhat overshadowed by other famous names. Nevertheless, in 1944, the Cambridge historian, G.M. Trevelyan, singled him from the rest: as the publisher of the monumental Dictionary of National Biography. As the nineteenth century’s cult of printed books inevitably now recedes in favour of information technology, perhaps the time is ripe for this succinct evaluation of an extraordinary publisher from Victorian times who promoted not only works by Leslie Stephen, Thackeray, and many other literary men but particularly works by women‐novelists, such as Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Gaskell, despite the fact that he was far from being a “feminist”, in our own contemporary sense.

There is little consensus regarding what constitutes an effective therapist when working with adults with intellectual disabilities (ID) who have a mental health problem. This study aims to explore whether clusters of clinical psychologists (CPs) could be differentiated with regards to beliefs as to what defines an effective therapist for adults with ID experiencing psychological distress and seeking treatment.

Four interviews with CPs and an associated thematic analysis created the 49-item Q-set. These items were then sorted into a forced quasi-normal distribution by N = 27 CPs via an online Q-sorting task.

Three participant clusters were identified in the principal components analysis that accounted for 49% of the variance. These clusters were labelled the creative collaborator, the reflective expert and the system integrator.

Differences exist regarding beliefs as to what the psychotherapeutic approaches effective therapists working with ID and comorbid mental health problems should take. These differences approximated to preferred psychological therapy models. This study is critiqued to enable future research on this topic to progress.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to explore what constitutes an effective psychological therapist for people who have ID.

Large numbers of nursing students and the COVID-19 pandemic made it necessary to relieve the pressure on UK hospitals to host clinical placements. One hospital innovated by providing a virtual placement online, immediately before an in-person placement. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the participant responses to the online virtual placement.

This was a pilot study evaluated after the placement, including a student survey (25 responses), four semi-structured interviews with students and four with staff in spring 2021.

High levels of approval of the innovation were recorded among both students and staff. Students were pleased to be taught by clinical experts, though some found it difficult to study at home and some found the hours long. High satisfaction levels may reflect the pandemic context: the placement reduced social isolation and the sense of education being interrupted. Participating students were in their final year of study, and the placement took place in the second year of the pandemic, so mutual familiarity and well-developed information technology skills may have made the innovation more acceptable.

The innovation has value and should be maintained post-pandemic to increase mental health in-person placement capacity and scaffold student learning.

This study added new knowledge to understanding about the utility of virtual placements in mental health nursing education.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the continued need for librarians now and in the future to possess excellent interpersonal and intrapersonal skills and receive continual opportunities for their development. The chapter is designed to gather in-depth views on staff abilities and training through the eyes of the author and other senior-level academic library administrators. In-depth survey/interviews with follow up emails for clarification were used to collect data from four senior level academic library administrators. The way by which we hire, enculturate, and provide ongoing professional development and training related to interpersonal/intrapersonal abilities of librarians matters. While the former area has received quite a bit of attention it is the latter which has yet to be fully embraced and incorporated within many organizations. There is a greater potential for library administrators to improve the lives and quality of their staff by not just focusing on specific skills but rather taking a more holistic approach from the hiring process forward that gives greater weight to individual interpersonal and intrapersonal skills, the latter more specifically referring to the application of mindfulness in the library workplace. This chapter explores professional development of staff from a unique perspective. The librarian as a whole is considered implying the need for administrators to be more concerned about the happiness and growth of staff as individuals as opposed to being just library employees. This in turn could lead to dramatic improvements in library effectiveness within their respective institutions.

The Dictionary of National Biography (or DNB as it is commonly called and as it will be referred to in this paper) is a classic. Depending on whether a library owns an original edition published by Smith, Elder and Company or a reprint edition published by Oxford University Press, sixty‐three brown volumes or twenty‐two blue volumes and supplements loom bulkily from the shelves. It would be an odd, ill‐trained reference librarian, historian, or scholar of English literature who has never heard of the DNB, let alone used and perused it. But mere bulk does not explain the lasting fame and staying power of this reference work, whose first volume appeared in January 1885 over a century ago.

This paper aims to assess the quality of systematic reviews on the effectiveness of psychological therapy for adults with intellectual disabilities (ID) and mental health difficulties.

Four electronic databases were used: Cochrane, PsycINFO, PubMed and Scopus. Studies were included if they were a systematic review focused primarily on psychological therapy for adults with ID and mental health difficulties. Systematic reviews focused on anger were also considered for inclusion. These reviews were rated for quality on the Amstar-2, a quality rating tool designed to evaluate systematic reviews.

Twelve relevant systematic reviews were identified, which included seven reviews focused primarily on cognitive behavioural therapy, two on psychodynamic therapy and three on third-wave therapies. The AMSTAR-2 indicated that all 12 reviews were of “critically low” quality. Thus, there are significant problems with the evidence base.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first systematic review of systematic reviews of the effectiveness of psychological therapies for people who have ID. It provides an overview of the quality of the evidence base into one place.

The purpose of this case study was to explore senior librarians’ perceptions of successful leadership skills in the 21st century. The data gathered from 10 senior library leaders consisted of demographic information and responses to six open-ended interview questions. From the NVivo 10 analysis, several significant themes emerged regarding successful library leadership skills in the 21st century at two levels: foundational and interpersonal. At the foundational level, technical and knowledge skills form the building blocks for the next level of interpersonal skills. Persuasion and collaborative skills are interwoven with these interpersonal skills, both of which are at the core of the postindustrial paradigm of leadership. These two levels of skills, with an emphasis on persuasion skills, should form the basis of succession planning programs for next generation librarians. Implementing such programs could lead to increased leadership diversity, greater job satisfaction, improved job performance and effectiveness, all of which help retain librarians and ease staff shortages. Further studies are recommended.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Term. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.