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Using a critical librarianship framework, this chapter argues that library administrators ought to advocate for comprehensive family leave policies and support employees more fully as they return from maternity leave. Improved policies support and enhance working conditions for all employees. Drawing on a diverse body of literature to illustrate that the significant life transition of becoming a mother is a unique opportunity for the library profession to improve the professional experience of its employees. Finally, practical action steps for supervisors are provided so they can structure a support plan for mothers transitioning back to work.

Technology offers great potential to gifted, talented, and creative (GCT) students, including students who are twice exceptional (i.e., students who are GCT as well as identified with a disability). However, little research exists regarding the use and evidence-base base of technologies for these populations. This chapter presents technology to support students who are GCT as well as students identified as twice exceptional, including assistive technology to support students in content area instruction. Although, an evidence-base is needed for using technology in education for GCT and twice-exceptional students, existing research supports using the Internet and Web 2.0 technologies with these students.

Academic outcomes for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) remain poor, especially in the area of reading, in particular, reading comprehension. In recent years, researchers have begun to investigate subcomponent skills of reading comprehension for children with ASD in order to better understand its development and potential interventions to enhance outcomes. This chapter highlights the current knowledge in the field in regards to the key cognitive and language skills associated with reading development for individuals with ASD. These include emergent-literacy skills, word-reading and decoding, reading fluency, oral language, and social cognition. Additionally, the chapter makes suggestions for future research in this area, in particular the need to conduct research to establish evidence-based practices to better support the syndrome-specific reading needs for this population.

The chapter Technological Advances in Special Education provides information on advances of technology and how such technological advances have influenced students with disabilities and special education across the globe. The chapter presents technological advances that benefited students with disabilities in developed countries as well as potential technologies to support students with disabilities in developing countries. The scant exiting literature on developing countries suggests some universal themes regarding technology for students with disabilities including access and training. Additional attention and research is needed on assistive technology to support students with disabilities in both developed and developing countries, with recognition that what works is developed counties may not work in developing.

Evaluation of any given student's responsiveness to intervention depends not only on how effective the intervention is, but also whether the intervention was delivered as intended as well as in the appropriate format and according to the most useful schedule. These latter elements are referred to as treatment integrity and treatment intensity, respectively. The purpose of this chapter is to define and describe how treatment integrity and intensity can be incorporated in the evaluation of outcomes associated with individualized intervention delivery.

Achieving reliable instrument reprocessing requires finding the right balance among cost, productivity, and safety. However, there have been few attempts to comprehensively examine sterile processing department (SPD) work systems. We considered an SPD as an example of a socio-technical system – where people, tools, technologies, the work environment, and the organization mutually interact – and applied work systems analysis (WSA) to provide a framework for future intervention and improvement.

The study was conducted at two SPD facilities at a 700-bed academic medical center servicing 56 onsite clinics, 31 operating rooms (ORs), and nine ambulatory centers. Process maps, task analyses, abstraction hierarchies, and variance matrices were developed through direct observations of reprocessing work and staff interviews and iteratively refined based on feedback from an expert group composed of eight staff from SPD, infection control, performance improvement, quality and safety, and perioperative services. Performance sampling conducted focused on specific challenges observed, interruptions during case cart preparation, and analysis of tray defect data from administrative databases.

Across five main sterilization tasks (prepare load, perform double-checks, run sterilizers, place trays in cooling, and test the biological indicator), variance analysis identified 16 failures created by 21 performance shaping factors (PSFs), leading to nine different outcome variations. Case cart preparation involved three main tasks: storing trays, picking cases, and prioritizing trays. Variance analysis for case cart preparation identified 11 different failures, 16 different PSFs, and seven different outcomes. Approximately 1% of cases had a tray with a sterilization or case cart preparation defect and 13.5 interruptions per hour were noted during case cart preparation.

While highly dependent upon the individual skills of the sterile processing technicians, making the sterilization process less complex and more visible, managing interruptions during case cart preparation, improving communication with the OR, and improving workspace and technology design could enhance performance in instrument reprocessing.

The aim of this paper is to examine the versatility of the MLIS degree through the lens of special libraries in terms of education, core competencies and benefits. Special libraries show the value of the Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) degree in preparing professionals to work across institutional boundaries in non-library and non-educational organizations and bring their services to the populace in sometimes unexpected places.

The authors first conducted a literature review of special librarians and their skillsets, as well as how to properly define “special library”. They then examined different MLIS programs geared toward special libraries and how library schools prepare special librarians to benefit their organizations.

The conclusion drawn is that possession of an MLIS degree lends a special librarian more credence in the execution of their duties because they have been educated in how to best benefit their institution. While additional subject expertise is an advantage to the special librarian, the skills learned in MLIS degree programs provide an essential foundation.

This is a collaborative view that brings together outside research regarding various types of special libraries and the librarians that work in them in an effort to illustrate the value of the MLIS degree in an original way.

MR. DENIS HOWELL, M.P., Minister for Libraries, who was to have told Conference how public libraries had progressed since the Act, had to withdraw and so we did not find out how the responsible minister felt about us.