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This column aims to discuss a tool used in user experience studies called personas.

This is a conceptual column discussing personas as a design tool.

Personas can be a powerful tool used in the design of digital library services.

The personas methodology could be a very powerful tool for libraries in helping them understand their constituent populations and serve them better.

What is it about academia anyway? We profess to hate it, spend endless amounts of time complaining about it, and yet we in academia will do practically anything to stay. The pay may be low, job security elusive, and in the end, it's not the glamorous work we envisioned it would be. Yet, it still holds fascination and interest for us. This is an article about American academic fiction. By academic fiction, I mean novels whosemain characters are professors, college students, and those individuals associated with academia. These works reveal many truths about the higher education experience not readily available elsewhere. We learn about ourselves and the university community in which we work.

Work on the design and implementation for solar homes has been expanded to the community scale in several international projects. If low-carbon emission housing is to make an impact on citywide consumption of energy, we must move towards community-scale implementation of solar technologies, both in new housing developments and in existing ones. However, the uptake of solar communities requires new methods for implementation to promote innovation in the building industry, new policies and programmes on energy consumption and energy subsidies, as well as community-scale design guidelines for solar or other renewable technologies.

This research surveys the implementation process of selected solar community projects in Netherlands, United States and Canada. It looks at new policies and programmes that are promoting community-scale solar projects from the perspective of innovation in the building industry. It examines the various actors that are necessary for solar communities within an urban planning framework and identifies five main actor groups.

Extends the notion of informality into the area of illegality, looking at how illegal crack vendors in New York use informality to reduce and pass risk to others. Focuses on the techniques used to avoid detection and arrest and the methods of placing risk of imprisonment on smaller, lower‐income dealers. Suggests that this process of exploitation only makes sense when seen in the broader context of inequality in US society where some have nothing to lose by going to jail.

Attempts to theorize the relationship between the informal and the illegal sectors of the economy. States that there are significant behavioural similarities. Proposes an emergent paradigm based on dual labour market theory to explain the similarites and differences in order to guide future research in each area. Applies the theory to the production and marketing of crack cocaine and shows how the model helps us to understand issues of exploitation and risk makagement within the drug market.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the challenges facing the Australian fashion industry (textile, clothing and footwear or TCF sector). Just at the point where Australian fashion has achieved international attention for its distinctive design practice, the industry is on the point of collapse. Since the 1980s, radical re-structuring aimed at reducing industry protection to encourage greater international competitiveness and innovation. Key policies have included tariff reduction, new forms of industry assistance, new manufacturing techniques, changing retail forms, and reform of employment and workplace conditions.

Overview of recent trends in the Australian fashion industry due to industry policies and the effects of globalisation.

Severe decline in industry viability.

Important multifaceted analysis of the state of the industry and tracking of effects of government policies.

Academic librarians are frequently called upon to provide instruction in relatively unfamiliar disciplines. This article presents introductory information for librarians providing bibliographic instruction (BI) in the field of psychology. Its primary purpose is to identify key readings from the library science and psychology literature that provide a basis for informed delivery of psychology BI. These works are fully identified in the list of references at the end of this article. Because the primary purpose of discipline‐specific bibliographic instruction is to teach the skills necessary for retrieval of the products of scholarship in that discipline, we begin with a discussion of scholarly communication and documentation, which describes how scholars and researchers within psychology communicate research findings and theoretical developments in the discipline. The major emphasis of this article is on formal, group instruction rather than individualized instruction, although much of the information will be applicable to both types.