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The purpose of this paper is to discuss three projects from three institutions that are dealing with challenges with natural sciences field documentation. Each is working to create the collection, item and data-level description required so that researchers can fully use the data to study how biodiversity has changed over time and space. Libraries, archives and museums recognize the need to make content searchable across material type. To create online catalogs that would make this possible, ideally, all records would describe one item. Museums and libraries describe their materials at the item level; however, archives must balance the need to describe the collection as a whole alongside needs of collection materials that may require more description to reconnect with library and museum items. There is a growing determination inside of archives to increase this flow of data, particularly for the natural sciences, by creating workflows that provide additional description to make these data discoverable. This process is a bit like drilling into the earth: each level must be described before the next can be dealt with.

The piece describes challenges, approaches and workflows of three institutions developing deeper levels of description for archival materials that will be made available online to a specialized audience. It also describes the methods developed so that the material’s data can eventually be accessed at a more granular level and linked to related resources.

Current systems, schema and standards are adapted as necessary, and the natural sciences archival community is still working to develop best practices. However, they are getting much closer through the collaboration made possible through grants in the recent years.

The work described in this paper is ongoing, and best practices resulting from the work are still under development.

Chance models – mechanisms that explain empirical regularities through unsystematic variance – have a long tradition in the sciences but have been historically marginalized in management scholarship, relative to an agentic worldview about the role of managers and organizations. An exception is the work of James G. March and his coauthors, who proposed a variety of chance models that explain important management phenomena, including the careers of top executives, managerial risk taking, and organizational anarchy, learning, and adaptation. This paper serves as a tribute to the beauty of these “little ideas” and demonstrates how they can be recombined to generate novel implications. In particular, we focus on the example of an inverted V-shaped performance association centering around the year when executives were featured in a prominent listing, Barron’s annual list of Top 30 chief executive officers. Our recombination of several chance models developed by March and his coauthors provides a novel explanation for why many of the executives’ exceptional performances did not persist. In contrast to the common accounts of complacency, hubris, and statistical regression, the results show that declines from high performance may result from the way luck interacts with these executives’ slow adaptation, incompetence, and self-reinforced risk taking. We conclude by elaborating on the normative implications of chance models, which address many current management and societal challenges. We further encourage the continued development of chance models to help explain performance differences, shifting from accounts that favor heroic stories of corporate leaders toward accounts that favor their changing fortunes.

This chapter examines megaproject design and planning in two “shrinking cities” – Philadelphia, PA and Detroit, MI – and concludes that megaproject “metastasis,” or repeated expansions into surrounding urban fabrics, is promoting the reduction of downtown into a series of self-contained enclaves. While political coalitions are constructing megaprojects, or large public works and/or single buildings, in cities around the world, in the United States, single-building megaprojects motivated by “growth coalitions” of public and private development actors have proliferated in downtowns since 1990. The urban design impacts of these megaprojects on the surrounding urban fabric have been little studied. Data on the institutional history, physical expansion, and relationship of the megaprojects to the urban fabric is combined with a qualitative analysis of megaproject theory and its application to the American condition, as well as to the political economy of development in American shrinking cities. The chapter concludes that megaprojects such as convention centers and casinos tend to expand inexorably once they are introduced into the American downtown. This metastasis results in the destruction of existing older buildings and street networks, the consolidation of street blocks into ever-larger superblocks, and the eventual physical restructuring of downtowns into enclaves of older fabric amidst clusters of megaproject superblocks. Applying Jacobs’ (1992) theory of “moral hybrids” between “commerce and politics” to megaproject metastasis, the chapter argues that while megaprojects may be inevitable in American downtowns, they should be sited away from active, small-scale urban fabrics to reduce the negative impacts of future metastases. The chapter takes a design-oriented perspective on a phenomenon that is almost always understood from a political economy perspective alone. Megaprojects are significant physical entities, and the chapter clarifies their physical impacts on the urban fabric while indicating urban design policy directions to reduce these impacts in future.

EVEN if library work with the young is the most written, and over‐written, subject in librarianship as is sometimes alleged, it still is the foundation of all library activity and must therefore come under continuous review. To some the subject is as dull as the essay questions set in the Entrance Examinations were alleged to be by a writer in The Library Assistant. To which we reply that all things have a certain dullness to those without sufficient imagination to look at them in other than the most conventional darkness. A Chesterton discourses entrancingly on a piece of chalk and brown paper, an empty train, a piece of string. So with our subject. We therefore make no other apology than this for a number of THE LIBRARY WORLD in which it is our main interest. Our children's libraries are, as yet, far from perfect; they issue too many drivelling books written by authors whose first essays in writing are children's books because they think them to be the easiest to write. The difference between a Ransome and—well, a thousand slush children's books—is as great as the difference between The Vicar of Wakefield and worst railway bookstall novelette. There is a great field being examined here by the more progressive children's librarians. There are many other questions, administrative and personal that have been and are under discussion. The writer of Letters on Our Affairs this month deals with some of these although, we may at once say, his views are not wholly those of THE LIBRARY WORLD.

Pre‐employment medical examinations with appropriate testing are required in many industries—a basic tenet of Occupational Medicine—and it has long been a recommendation of many in community medicine and environmental health for those food handlers whose close contact with open food, aspects of its preparation, processing, sale, exposure for sale, make their personal health important and in prevention of diseases and may constitute a health hazard to food consumers. Epidemiological studies have revealed too many instances of a human source of disease, especially in milk and water, for this to be denied or under‐estimated. Food poisioning outbreaks caused by a carrier, of chronic or limited duration, enable those investigating such outbreaks to see there could be advantages in medical screening of certain employees especially in certain areas of food trades. The main problem is to decide the extent of the discipline and who should be subject to it. The fact that by far the majority of the examinations and tests will prove negative should not be seen as removing the need for the service. After all, there are a number of similar circumstances in public health. Meat inspection, for example, in which a 100% inspection of all food animals slaughtered for human food is now fully established, it is not suggested that inspections should in any way be reduced despite the fact that a number of the diseases, eg., tuberculosis, no longer occurs as it once did, which was the prime cause of meat inspection being brought into being. Other areas where routine medical examinations reveal satisfactory health with only a few isolated cases requiring attention, is the school medical service. Here, the “de‐bunkers” have had some success, but if children are not regularly examined at vulnerable age levels and especially in between where the occasion demands, there is no question that much will be missed and ill‐health progress to a chronic state.

In our last ‘Notes and News’ we made an unfortunate mistake. In writing on the poetry section of the School Library Association's book list Fiction, Verse and Legend we referred to the Bodley Head series of poetry for the young as ‘now regrettably out of print’. Before making this categorical statement we had referred to the Bodley Head's current catalogue ‘with complete back‐list’, and had failed to find any reference to the series, but we had also failed to notice the comparatively insignificant sentence on page ii of the cover: ‘Children's books are listed in a separate catalogue.’

As both concept and process, privatization possesses ambiguous connotations and multiple meanings. Webster's Dictionary (1981) defines one related noun, privatism, as “an attitude of uncommitment or uninvolvement in anything beyond one's immediate interests,” while another associated noun, privacy, denotes a state of “withdrawal from society or the public interest” (Oxford English Dictionary, 1972). If government is a means of providing a wide range of collective goods, which do not necessarily lend themselves to market exchange, the public sector is naturally a highly visible target.⁴ At the same time, unrestrained public-sector expansion inevitably leads to public policy failure, as problems of communication, coordination, effective cost–benefit control, and revenue satiation accumulate.⁵ Privatization represents a logical reaction.