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This paper aims to examine the ways in which the criminal justice system has evolved to accommodate mental illness. Mental health courts are one such alternative; these courts actively seek rehabilitative and therapeutic outcomes for participants. However, current literature suggests that these courts are ineffective for offenders who have been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD).

The aim of the current inquiry was to determine the degree to which participation in the Assessment and Referral Court (ARC) List in the Magistrates’ Court of Victoria reduced re-offending rates for offenders diagnosed with BPD by providing a comparative analysis of pre and post ARC List offending.

The results of a two-year recidivism study suggest that successful completion of the ARC List reduces recidivism for 50% of offenders diagnosed with BPD.

To the authoring team’s knowledge, this is the second paper to explore the efficacy of the Assessment of Referral Court List (Magistrates’ Court of Victoria) in reducing recidivist behaviours for programme participants; however, it is the first paper to look specifically at the recidivist behaviours of participants of the Assessment of Referral Court List (Magistrates’ Court of Victoria) who have been diagnosed with BPD.

The vision of robotics in the home promises increased convenience, comfort, companionship and greater security for users. The robot industry risks causing harm to users, being rejected by society at large or being regulated in overly prescriptive ways if robots are not developed in a socially responsible manner. The purpose of this paper is to explore some of the challenges and requirements for designing responsible domestic robots.

The paper examines definitions of robotics and the current commercial state of the art. In particular, it considers the emerging technological trends, such as smart homes, that are already embedding computational agents in the fabric of everyday life. The paper then explores the role of values in design, aligning with human computer interaction, and considers the importance of the home as a deployment setting for robots. The paper examines what responsibility in robotics means and draws lessons from past home information technologies. An exploratory pilot survey was conducted to understand user concerns about different aspects of domestic robots such as form, privacy and trust. The paper provides these findings, married with literature analysis from across technology law, computer ethics and computer science.

By drawing together both empirical observations and conceptual analysis, this paper concludes that user centric design is needed to create responsible domestic robotics in the future.

This multidisciplinary paper provides conceptual and empirical research from different domains to unpack the challenges of designing responsible domestic robotics. In doing this, the paper seeks to bridge the gap between the normative dimensions of how responsible robots should be built, and the practical dimensions of how people want to live with them in context.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the university teaching staff’s perception about functions, benefits and barriers of human resource information system (HRIS). It also aims to explore the relevance of attitudinal/demographic diversity with focused HRIS dimensions.

A 26-item questionnaire was developed on the basis of similar research studies. Responses were collected through electronic mail from 90 faculty members of seven state universities in India. Descriptive statistics along with t-test and analysis of variance were used to answer the research questions.

The results of the study reported that HRIS is mostly used for administrative purpose and not taken as strategic requirement. Results also revealed that the perceived functions, benefits and barriers in adoption of HRIS do not vary group-wise.

The findings of the study potentially can help in developing and implementing of HRIS in similar types of organizations.

Past literature on HRIS mainly comes from the developed countries and is confined to for-profit organizations. The present study is among the few that coherently took up the issue from non-profit organizations, i.e. universities of a developing country.

The purpose of this paper is to show that despite welfare retrenchment and political rhetoric towards welfare, spending on residential addiction treatment should be protected.

Examining benefits in context of costs, the research used social return on investment to monetise benefits and compare with costs. Based at a residential addiction centre, the research used questionnaires and focus groups with residents and former residents.

The centre created almost £4 of benefit for every £1 of cost. Whilst the bulk of savings came from health, housing and criminal justice, there was also a regenerative impact for the local economy.

Sampling in sensitive themes is always problematic, however, the research had contact with many respondents, achieved data saturation and used the centre's success rate as a guide to weight the findings.

The benefits of addiction treatment go beyond health outcomes and raise questions about how this should be reflected in cost distribution. Consequently, this has implications for the ways in which addiction services should be measuring their successes beyond solely health outcomes.

Existing research has largely overlooked the benefit of addiction treatment to the local economy and the fact that, as an investment, this benefit will continue to grow as more people enter the labour market over time.

The research recognises the political context of funding and measures success beyond solely health outcomes. Furthermore, the research recognises the regenerative impact of addiction treatment, which is often overlooked in similar research.

Retailing in Scotland has shown dynamism in the last decade. Assesses the factors which have influenced change and how Scotland differs from the rest of the UK in terms of market concentration, corporate decision making and inter‐format competition.

It has often been said that a great part of the strength of Aslib lies in the fact that it brings together those whose experience has been gained in many widely differing fields but who have a common interest in the means by which information may be collected and disseminated to the greatest advantage. Lists of its members have, therefore, a more than ordinary value since they present, in miniature, a cross‐section of institutions and individuals who share this special interest.

Our nineteenth volume opens with this page in circumstances as unsettled and uncertain as any in the history of this or any other journal. In defiance of prophecy the European conflict drags its colossal slow length wearily along, bearing with it the hopes and fears of the whole human race. It is not to be wondered at that the aims for which we strive have not made great strides in the year that has just closed. Important as we recognize literature and its distribution to be, the pressing material needs of the people often cause them to lose sight of the invincible fact that the freedom of the human spirit, its intellectual and humane expansion, are, after all is said, the ultimate aims of the war. It will not be of abiding service to the British race if in conquering the Germans we sacrifice beyond redemption all those sources of sweetness and light which have been the outcome of centuries of British endeavour. We do not fear that such sacrifice will be demanded of us, but the logic of material facts demonstrates that all who care for schools, libraries, museums, art galleries, music, and all other agencies for the moral and spiritual uplifting of men, must be on their guard against the well‐meaning but ignorant encroachments of those who would rather “save money” by abolishing them, than, for example, by foregoing their own individual luxuries.

WE begin a new year, in which we wish good things for all who work in libraries and care for them, in circumstances which are not unpropitious. At times raven voices prophesy the doom of a profession glued to things so transitory as books are now imagined to be, by some. Indeed, so much is this a dominant fear that some librarians, to judge by their utterances, rest their hopes upon other recorded forms of knowledge‐transmission; forms which are not necessarily inimical to books but which they think in the increasing hurry of contemporary life may supersede them. These fears have not been harmful in any radical way so far, because they may have increased the librarian's interest in the ways of bringing books to people and people to books by any means which successful business firms use (for example) to advertise what they have to sell. The modern librarian becomes more and more the man of business; some feel he becomes less and less the scholar; but we suggest that this is theory with small basis in fact. Scholars are not necessarily, indeed they can rarely be, bookish recluses; nor need business men be uncultured. For men of plain commonsense there need be few ways of life that are so confined that they exclude their followers from other ways and other men's ideas and activities. And, as for the transitoriness of books and the decline of reading, we ourselves decline to acknowledge or believe in either process. Books do disappear, as individuals. It is well that they do for the primary purpose of any book is to serve this generation in which it is published; and, if there survive books that we, the posterity of our fathers, would not willingly let die, it is because the life they had when they were contemporary books is still in them. Nothing else can preserve a book as a readable influence. If this were not so every library would grow beyond the capacity of the individual or even towns to support; there would, in the world of readers, be no room for new writers and their books, and the tragedy that suggests is fantastically unimaginable. A careful study, recently made of scores of library reports for 1951–52, which it is part of our editorial duty to make, has produced the following deductions. Nearly every public library, and indeed other library, reports quite substantial increases in the use made of it; relatively few have yet installed the collections of records as alternatives to books of which so much is written; further still, where “readers” and other aids to the reading of records, films, etc., have been installed, the use of them is most modest; few librarians have a book‐fund that is adequate to present demands; fewer have staffs adequate to the demands made upon them for guidance by the advanced type of readers or for doing thoroughly the most ordinary form of book‐explanation. It is, in one sense a little depressing, but there is the challenging fact that these islands contain a greater reading population than they ever had. One has to reflect that of our fifty millions every one, including infants who have not cut their teeth, the inhabitants of asylums, the illiterate—and, alas, there are still thousands of these—and the drifters and those whose vain boast is that “they never have time to read a book”—every one of them reads six volumes a year. A further reflection is that public libraries may be the largest distributors, but there are many others and in the average town there may be a half‐dozen commercial, institutional and shop‐libraries, all distributing, for every public library. This fact is stressed by our public library spending on books last year at some two million pounds, a large sum, but only one‐tenth of the money the country spent on books. There are literally millions of book‐readers who may or may not use the public library, some of them who do not use any library but buy what they read. The real figure of the total reading of our people would probably be astronomical or, at anyrate, astonishing.