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The purpose of this paper is to examine a pilot program implemented by the Houston Academy of Medicine‐Texas Medical Center Library and The University of Texas School of Nursing at Houston to design the multi‐institutional repository for the Texas Medical Center.

The steps involved in the program are outlined and the lessons learned from the implementation are analyzed.

The success of the institutional repository depends on appropriate communication with faculty, a deep understanding of the publishing process, identifying appropriate partners, designing a flexible technology infrastructure, and engaging in active collaboration with key players. The Library is the logical center for this activity.

The paper should assist libraries with the unique activities involved in creating a viable multi‐institutional repository in a research‐intense academic medical environment.

This paper analyzes the challenges inherent in introducing institutional digital repositories to the academic medical community. Currently, institutional repositories are being developed in only a small percentage of the academic medical centers in the USA.

In 1992, the mainframe market collapsed, almost taking Amdahl with it. Our reporter spends a day with top strategist Linda Alepin to learn what the company did—and is doing—to survive.

COMPUTER INTERFACES AND THE ISSUE OF CONNECTIVITY. Of near mythic proportions, the interaction of humans with computers has always been treated with awe, mystery, and confusion, even in these days of desktop access to Crays. People process information quite differently from machines and the differences are both startling and complementary. Computers make up for the obvious human weaknesses of retaining, storing, and recalling large quantities of information accurately. Humans on the other hand process massive amounts of diverse data rapidly, thanks to a variety of sensitive input devices that have not found their counterparts on a computer. The interface between computers and humans, for decades, has favored machine processing with commands encoded in abbreviated scripts and abrupt codes. Only recently has there been a move to use more humane means of access to automation with the introduction of symbols in the form of icons and objects displayed on a conventional CRT. How has this change in machine interfacing affected the overall implementation of computer technology? Where is this iconographic explosion leading end users?

This paper reports preliminary findings about how households organize street vending businesses in response to varying sources and degrees of uncertainty. The thesis is that households organize themselves in different ways in response to different types of uncertainty associated with 1) earning different types of income and 2) differences as well as changes in intra‐household relationships. The important findings are twofold: first, that household members earn income from both “formal” and “informal” sources BOTH sequentially and simultaneously. The second finding is that people coordinate the efforts of household members with respect to (un)certainty to keep income flowing from the income‐earning activities the members are practicing. I review some empirical work on the informal economy and follow this discussion with data from Chicago's Maxwell Street Market.

Over the past eight years, the MELVYL catalog has become one of the largest public access catalogs in the world, and now plays a central role in providing access to the library resources of the University of California. Currently, under heavy load, the MELVYL catalog supports many hundreds of simultaneous terminal connections, servicing over a quarter of a million queries a week and displaying more than two million records a week to its user community. This article discusses the history of the network that has supported the MELVYL catalog from the early days of its prototype to the present. It also describes both the current technical and policy issues that must be addressed as the network moves into the 1990s, and the roles that the network is coming to play in integrating local automation, the union catalog, access to resource databases, and other initiatives. Sidebars discuss the TCP/IP protocol suite, internet protocol gateways, and Telenet and related inter‐operability problems.

Since its origins during the Second World War, the computer industry has grown more rapidly than any other technology in history, and this growth has spawned a wealth of new terms and manners‐of‐speaking to describe computers and the uses to which they can be put. Such terms are often referred to collectively as computerese. The thesis of Barry's entertaining book is that the use of computerese is increasingly being extended to a wealth of other subjects that are often totally unrelated to computing. Barry refers to this use (or abuse) of language as technobabble: the subject matter and the pleasingly tongue‐in‐cheek style can be judged from the introduction, which starts as follows: ‘This paper‐based, productized bookware module is designed to support the robust implementation of a friendly, context‐driven interface between the developer and the end‐user. Did you understand this sentence? If so, you are fluent in technobabble’.

Forced eviction is a topic of growing importance globally, and the purpose of this article is to investigate a much‐publicised recent case involving Gypsies and Travellers in the United Kingdom (not usually a country associated with such actions).

After setting the context of planning enforcement law in the UK, Green Belt and other planning policies, and the status of Gypsies/Travellers as a disadvantaged minority group, the paper traces the history of the Dale Farm eviction over a 25‐year period and analyses the legal arguments put to the High Court in unsuccessful attempts to defer and over‐turn the eviction, against the context of internationally agreed guidelines.

The research found that the judiciary gave full consideration to all aspects, in accordance with ECHR case law, and upheld the Green Belt and planning objections. The UK government was determined to proceed, resisting various offers of mediation, and the site was cleared even though no appropriate alternative accommodation was available, and notwithstanding that the occupiers owned their own plots.

The case is a new development in a long‐running history of forced eviction of Gypsies by local authorities, and is of interest in comparative study of treatment of Gypsies in other European countries, particularly in the context of the recent European Union Roma Inclusion Strategy.