Search results

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.

The following is an annotated list of materials dealing with information literacy including instruction in the use of information resources, research, and computer skills related to retrieving, using, and evaluating information. This review, the twenty‐second to be published in Reference Services Review, includes items in English published in 1995. After 21 years, the title of this review of the literature has been changed from “Library Orientation and Instruction” to “Library Instruction and Information Literacy,” to indicate the growing trend of moving to information skills instruction.

While some libraries have done their best over the years to inform the public as to what they are doing and can do as regards helping readers, others seem to move along without making any special effort to publicise their facilities. In the old days modesty was a virtue, but now it is its own reward. Government departments, which used to shun the limelight, now employ public relations officers in large numbers, and professional bodies and big business houses constantly seek publicity. Times have changed, and the battle is to the strong; and it is unfortunately generally felt that the institution or service that does not speak for itself has little to speak about. It may frankly be said that if a service is in a position to enlarge its sphere of influence and esteem it should do so to the utmost of its endeavour. But it will be granted that if its publicity is not justified by performance, there will likely be an unhappy reaction.

Expert witnessing in asylum cases involves depicting the conditions of the applicant’s home country as a context for judging a well-founded fear for life or safety. Most of the elements involved in the work of the expert country witness are dynamic and change over time, creating new challenges and new resources for describing and interpreting country context. Examining several characteristic Honduran asylum cases separated by 20 years reveals not only an increasingly complex and multifaceted set of relevant conditions in both the sending and the host country, but also a significant broadening of the anthropological “tool kit” available to the expert country witness (as the expert witness becomes aware of its relevance to country conditions at a particular time), and an increasingly reflexive and complex relationship of the expert witness to the country in question and to the court. In the interim, emerging problems of contextual complexity, subjectivity, changing and competing images of reality, and the shifting applicability of legal and sociological definitions and categories arise and can be partially addressed with emerging anthropological or social scientific resources, raising anew the nature of the relationship of the expert witness to the court and the possible mutual influence of social science and legal culture upon each other over time. As the number of refugee seekers increases globally, can expert witnesses trained in social sciences help asylum courts to imagine new ways of bridging the gap between legal regimes of governmentality and the subjectivity of refugees?

Neoliberalism has profoundly influenced the relationship between law and the state. Market rhetoric and ideology have fostered Janus faces of law, a double vision of law where both sides of the face adhere to one another through neoliberalism. One face relies on market values and individual liberty, seemingly favoring the reduction of state authority, actually to enhance law’s power. The other Janus face, also drawing on values of market efficiency and individual responsibility, expands criminal justice and its role in the state. Together the Janus faces of law diminish democratic values and practices of law in favor of economic growth, efficient governance, and punishment.

The management of children′s literature is a search for value and suitability. Effective policies in library and educational work are based firmly on knowledge of materials, and on the bibliographical and critical frame within which the materials appear and might best be selected. Boundaries, like those between quality and popular books, and between children′s and adult materials, present important challenges for selection, and implicit in this process are professional acumen and judgement. Yet also there are attitudes and systems of values, which can powerfully influence selection on grounds of morality and good taste. To guard against undue subjectivity, the knowledge frame should acknowledge the relevance of social and experiential context for all reading materials, how readers think as well as how they read, and what explicit and implicit agendas the authors have. The good professional takes all these factors on board.

For nearly 80 years, the field of macroeconomics has largely been shaped by the aftermath of the Keynesian revolution. Many economists have argued that this revolution and the subsequent internal and external disputes it has sparked have had the unfortunate side effect of crowding out much of what was good in macro-level analysis before it, leading to the dissatisfactory state of macroeconomics we have today. In the search for alternative paths for macroeconomics, I focus on two separate but compatible traditions: monetary disequilibrium (MD) theory and the Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT). I argue that scholars in these traditions employed a far richer micro-theoretic explanation for the business cycle well before Keynes’s General Theory. Unfortunately, their ideas were not united in time to mount a sufficient counterattack to the Keynesian crusade. My goal is to unite the best elements of these two traditions by providing what I believe is the “missing link” that can help connect these alternative paths: free banking theory.

THE Reference Department of Paisley Central Library today occupies the room which was the original Public Library built in 1870 and opened to the public in April 1871. Since that date two extensions to the building have taken place. The first, in 1882, provided a separate room for both Reference and Lending libraries; the second, opened in 1938, provided a new Children's Department. Together with the original cost of the building, these extensions were entirely financed by Sir Peter Coats, James Coats of Auchendrane and Daniel Coats respectively. The people of Paisley indeed owe much to this one family, whose generosity was great. They not only provided the capital required but continued to donate many useful and often extremely valuable works of reference over the many years that followed. In 1975 Paisley Library was incorporated in the new Renfrew District library service.

THE Hastings Conference of the Library Association has come and gone, and the battle fought during the Annual General Meeting was in full keeping with the town's historical tradition. But whereas the defeat of Harold in 1066 led to a long era of stability in English history, the results of the A.G.M. vote last month will cause chaos and uncertainty in the immediate future of the Library Association. After protracted debate the Council's proposals for reorganisation went to the vote and gained a majority of very nearly 4 to 1. But just before the ballot it transpired that, at the request of the Privy Council, to which body the bye‐law alterations must be sent for approval, the votes of institutional delegates had to be counted separately from those of personal members. At the count, over 500 personal members voted for, with 35 against, but the institutional delegate vote was 135 for, with 141 against. So, for the present, all is uncertainty, and librarians everywhere will now await the Privy Council's decision with more than usual interest and impatience.

Research in undergraduate mathematics education (RUME), the study of teaching and learning of college mathematics, is a new area of research in mathematics. Information to support this discipline is found in publications from all over the world, in the form of monographs, reports, research guidelines and resource manuals, as well as journal articles. Researchers in RUME require access to materials that are specific not only to their field, but also to the broader literature of mathematics, education, learning theories, instructional strategies, alternative assessment techniques, cognitive development and human behavior. This annotated bibliography is designed to be a template for a comprehensive and up‐to‐date collection of RUME resources. World Wide Web (Web) locations for many of the items are provided, as are descriptions of several Web sites that present information of interest to RUME researchers.