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The Barbican Library is the headquarters of the City of London's lending library service. It includes a music library and a children's library as well as a special section devoted to the fine and performing arts. Anyone who lives, works or studies in the City may apply to be a member. Others who wish to join may do so under the interavailability scheme.

As a follow up to the bespectacled and jolly photo of myself (NLW, June 86) along with accompanying cheery sentences about how easy it is to be a book reviewer. I thought I would pen a few timely phrases on how to go about reviewing for NLW.

The issue of employment status lies at the heart of much conflict in the gig economy, with many gig economy workers effectively excluded from statutory employment protection because of it. Establishing employment status continues to be the gateway to accessing most UK statutory employment rights, a fact which makes the exclusion of casual workers from much statutory protection seem arbitrary and unjust. Employment status has been historically determined by common law conceptions of the contract of employment. This creates particular difficulties for casual workers, who have typically had to prove a requirement to perform personal service and to show that the contract was based on mutual obligations in order to be recognised as employees. The advent of the gig economy has seen the concept of employment status evolve as courts and legislators have struggled to adapt to a more flexible labour market. Likewise, gig economy employers have gone to considerable lengths to try to circumvent the legal protections available to their workers. This chapter will examine the evolving role of common law doctrine in defining employment status and the emergence of the category of ‘worker’ as an definition of employment status for those who work in the gig economy. It will analyse prominent cases involving gig economy employers (such as Uber BV v Aslam) and explore how these cases have re-defined contractual doctrine. Finally, the chapter will analyse the Taylor Review (2017) and examine the viability of a conceptual uncoupling of statutory employment protection from contractual doctrine.

This paper analyzes the connection between black political protest and mobilization, and the rise and fall of a black urban regime. The case of Oakland is instructive because by the mid-1960s the ideology of “black power” was important in mobilizing two significant elements of the historically disparaged black community: (1) supporters of the Black Panthers and, (2) neighborhood organizations concentrated in West Oakland. Additionally, Oakland like the city of Atlanta also developed a substantial black middle class that was able to mobilize along the lines of its own “racialized” class interests. Collectively, these factors were important elements in molding class-stratified “black power” and coalitional activism into the institutional politics of a black urban regime in Oakland. Ultimately, reversal factors would undermine the black urban regime in Oakland. These included changes in the race and class composition of the local population: black out-migration, the “new immigration,” increasing (predominantly white) gentrification, and the continued lack of opportunity for poor and working-class blacks, who served as the unrequited base of the black urban regime. These factors would change the fortunes of black political life in Oakland during the turbulent neoliberal era.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the application of user centred design (UCD) within a research project to support the design, development and evaluation of a brain computer interface (BCI) with associated home-based services and remote therapy station for people with acquired brain injury (ABI).

A multi- stakeholder UCD approach was adopted to include people living with ABI, their caregivers and therapists providing rehabilitation. A three-phased iterative approach was implemented: Phase 1 was to gather user requirements, Phase 2 an iterative design phase with end user (EU) groups and therapists and finally the verification and implementation phase. The final phase had two strands of a home-based BCI evaluation with target EUs and their caregivers, alongside this, therapists evaluated the final therapist station that supports the use of the BCI at home. Ethical governance, inline with Ulster University, was awarded.

UCD enabled the co-creation and validation of a home-based BCI system for social inclusion and rehabilitation.

This was the first BCI project to adopt UCD to design and validation a novel home-based BCI system and migrate this from the lab to home. It highlights the importance of UCD to bridge the gap between the technical developers and those whom the technology is aimed at. This complex design process is essential to increase usability and reduce device abandonment.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the procedures taken by public library staff in response to extensive damage to a research collection due to a large natural disaster.

Based on the methodology used by one research collection in response to a large‐scale disaster, recommendations are presented in the paper for future disaster planning and creating an individualized disaster response.

The study finds that each institution develops different procedures in the wake of disasters, and creating a unique disaster plan and response is key to the successful recovery of collections.

The methods used in response to Hurricane Katrina may not necessarily correspond to other types of disasters or all institutions; however, planning for all types of disasters is encouraged. A selected bibliography is included that provides current resources on the subject.

Methods utilized in the Biloxi Public Library's response to Hurricane Katrina and lessons learned may be applicable to other institutions and the future of disaster response and collection recovery.

While recounting the impact of Hurricane Katrina on one collection, there are recommendations for the future of disaster planning at the institutional level.

Communications professor, Norman Denzin, describes interactional moments that create potentially transformational experiences as epiphanies, which are subdivided into the major, the minor, the cumulative, the illuminative, and the relived. In his paradigm for the examination of racialized identity formation, psychologist William Cross offers a Nigrescence Model with a four-stage approach to understand the development of Black racial identity. Cross’ model has been modified to assess other aspects of identity formation such as gender consciousness. My story illuminates how the convergence of these theories offers a new lens through which to view the maturation of raced and gendered subjectivities. This performance text uses an Africana feminism performance pedagogy rooted in Yoruba feminist philosophy to expose the reproductive violence perpetuated against Black women and recover the healing, generative force of female power.