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This paper aims to explore current trends in e‐book lending in US academic libraries and describes the Kindle pilot for interlibrary loan at Eastern Washington University. It also seeks to examine previous e‐reader pilots at the University of Nebraska‐Omaha, and the Douglas County Library e‐book purchasing program.

The author surveys US libraries on e‐book lending practices and conducts a Kindle pilot program.

E‐book licensing agreements need to be re‐evaluated and interlibrary loan staff should be included in those negotiations.

This paper offers practical solutions for library e‐book lending.

The purpose of this study was to explore the social needs and experiences of older prisoners who were attending one of two social initiatives in a prison in England.

This paper is based on an interpretative phenomenological study, conducted in a prison in the South West of England. Older prisoners attending an initiative implemented for those over 55, a purposive activity or a social task group, participated in focus groups, which were audio recorded and thematically analysed.

Two overarching themes were identified. Firstly, the need to feel safe: prisoners felt attending an initiative provided them with a safe haven away from noisy and boisterous younger prisoners, who they perceived as different from them and who received preferential treatment. Secondly, being provided with a purpose: prisoners felt they belonged among their peers, which motivated them to attend and support group activities.

This study was completed in one prison. However, both initiatives supported the social needs of older prisoners and enabled them to leave their cells, although they felt unsafe when not attending an initiative.

There remains a need to support the process of integrating younger and older prisoners, by the provision of both integrated and separate initiatives, with the aim of developing cross-generational and bi-directional peer support.

There is a growing recognition that participation in ‘shadow’ structures such as youth councils, forums and parliaments does not meet all of young people’s needs for action and engagement, and a growing emphasis on finding and recognising opportunities for young people to move out of these structures and initiate their own forms of democratic action for change. This chapter, co-written by academics and young researchers recruited from a youth council, tells the story of an action research project set up under the auspices of PARTISPACE which aimed to learn about the dynamics of self-initiated and autonomous youth participation beyond the confines of formalised youth participation structures. In this chapter, the authors explain what we all brought to the project, reflect from different perspectives on the process we went through, the challenges we encountered, the outcomes we achieved, and make sense of what we, collectively and individually, learned from the experience about different processes of participation.

This article puts a fresh light on Jackson’s elementary curriculum in Western Australia which was a unique blend of the ‘new education’, designed to complement the Western Australia government’s economic development policies. In this respect, he followed the work of Rooper, who brought an agricultural emphasis to rural elementary education in England. In Western Australia, Jackson not only promoted the established practical forms of the ‘new education’ but, swayed by political leaders, encouraged a rural focus on the elementary government school curriculum, both for educational as well as utilitarian purposes, thereby serving the needs of the individual as well as the colonial economy.

In the years 2016–2019, in collaboration with primary school students from Wrocław, Poland, the authors endeavoured to implement participatory methods in children’s literature studies. Their collaborations with these children resulted in the formation of an intergenerational research team and the publication of two peer-reviewed articles co-written with child researchers. As their thinking about child-led research has gravitated towards approaches accentuating the value of co-thinking, they have grown convinced of the potential of participatory research to counterbalance the adultism prevailing in children’s literature studies. Building on the authors’ two participatory projects: ‘Children’s Voices in the Polish Canon Wars: Participatory Research in Action’ (Chawar et al., 2018) and ‘Productive Remembering of Polish Childhoods: Child–Adult Memory-Work with the School Literary Canon’ (Deszcz-Tryhubczak et al., 2019), this chapter offers a meta-critical reflection on the practical and ethical challenges of working on a research paper co-authored by young collaborators. They focus on issues linked to child–adult co-authorship, such as anonymity concerns, the ethics of representations, time pressures, and institutional challenges. They propose that the key to reassessing the status of child-led research in academia lies in accepting the ‘messiness’ of participatory research, treating it as a constant work in progress rather than a final outcome or product, and shifting away from the more rigid format of academic writing towards a collectivistic and free-flowing narrative.

This chapter explores how the ideal of autonomous ecological living – ecotopia – is created and compromised by the everyday cultural life of mainstream society. It investigates the degree to which the structures of the mainstream are eluded, changed and subverted to create ‘ecotopia’, and also how this ideal is everyday compromised to survive. Drawing on empirical research undertaken at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT), this chapter argues that fragmented utopias are inevitable when attempting to live ecologically in twenty-first century Britain. However, the elusiveness of ecotopia offers an important opportunity to normalise these experiments in ecological living and emphasise their connections and capacity to inform mainstream society.

AS Canadians themselves will quickly inform you, this is a big, young country—Great Britain would fit into a small part of Alberta, large stretches of which are still not accurately recorded on large scale maps. Indeed, I listened to radio reports of a search for two aircraft on the first morning we were there. One aircraft (a helicopter) had been missing in the North Western Territories with a Calgary man aboard for two weeks and was eventually found crashed; the other, missing for two days, was a Cessna seaplane which had run out of fuel and punctured a float as it landed close to the shore of the Great Slave Lake. The occupants were rescued by air from this largely uncharted waste.