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With population projections indicating that the number of older adults in the UK (those aged 65 years and over) will increase from 9.6 million in 2005 to 12.7 million in 2021, the numbers of those growing older with a serious mental illness (SMI) is likely to rise. Currently there is a lacuna of both policy and quality research evidence on how to meet the needs of this vulnerable group of citizens. The purpose of this paper is to add to the emerging debate and discourse around current policy and practice in this field.

The authors have undertaken a general review of both the literature and current UK policy guidance to determine the current state of provision for people with a SMI.

Much of the relevant literature the authors identified originates from the USA, with older adults with SMI perceived as an under‐served population in need of urgent attention. Additionally, UK policy provision is patchy with very limited pockets of good practice currently available to guide clinicians and inform service users.

Clinicians, researchers and other stakeholders must engage with service users, their family and/or friends to produce quality and meaningful research to improve outcomes for this vulnerable group of citizens. Finally, the policy, practice and service user communities need to collaborate in a spirit of “boundary spanning” working across disciplines to generate practical policies which can be operationalised by organisations and individuals.

This paper highlights the distinct lack of literature, evidence and policy which currently exists in the UK addressing the needs of older adults with a serious mental illness.

The paper aims to present some points for discussion around issues in qualitative evaluation to do with access to sites and individuals, and relationships between the researcher/evaluator and participants. It is based on evidence from three projects in which the authors are, or have recently been, involved: JUBILEE (about monitoring and evaluating user behaviour in information seeking), EASE‐IT (about the encouragement of innovative teaching in engineering), and Virtual Gallery (a small scale local case study of a one semester option on a history of art course). The projects have encountered similar problems in relation to the collection of first hand qualitative data, and have relevance for the whole area of performance measurement in library and information studies, which is increasingly needing to also collect qualitative data as part of the evaluation of both projects and services.

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.