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It is part of educational folklore that Australian State school systems are highly centralised. A corollary of the lore is that schools generally lack the organisational flexibility to cater adequately for the diverse educational needs of their students. This article tests these beliefs as they relate to the States of Queensland and New South Wales. The research finds that the form of system‐level directives is more prescriptive in the latter State. In both States, however, the proportion of time which must be devoted to prescribed activities is less than many would expect, both for teachers and pupils. Even where head office directives appear to constrain, regional office staff can practise “benign neglect” in their policing of the directives, if they can see that there are educationally sound reasons for doing so. The article finds that there is sufficient substance in the folklore to give conservative principals an excuse to resist introducing innovations in their schools. Any principals who are determined to adapt their schools′ operations to better serve the educational needs of their students are however, unlikely to be prevented by central directives.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss various aspects of the development of the places of apparitions and miraculous images, motives and behavioral characteristics of pilgrims coming to the miraculous places of the Virgin Mary in Lithuania.

The paper reviews literature about miraculous events and presents miraculous places in Lithuania (apparition places of the Virgin Mary and sites of miraculous images). Various classifications are applied. Pilgrims ' motivation and behavioral aspects are analyzed based on the quantitative survey.

The research showed that the main motives of religious pilgrims visiting miraculous places were asking for God’s grace, health, expressing gratitude to Jesus or Virgin Mary as well as spiritual quest and renewal. These places attract pilgrims who want to solve different problems in their life or to recover from illnesses. Religious pilgrimage has different forms and rituals, and constitutes different models of the specific behavior. During the journey, pilgrims perform various religious practices such as praying, singing hymns, kissing the relics, etc. The grouping of devotional rituals performed during the pilgrimage and at the destination place is presented.

The paper is important to the researchers of pilgrimage and religious tourism. For the first time, miraculous places of Lithuania are analyzed in the broader international context. Classifications of the miraculous sites indicate various aspects of the development of these places. Motives and behavioral characteristics of pilgrims enable to better understand the multidimensional reality of religious pilgrimage.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how entrepreneur-mothers experience independence in the transition to entrepreneurship, and whether they perceive independence as an agentic, opportunity-maximisation motive or a constrained, necessity-driven response.

Adopting a qualitative and interpretive approach, the authors analysed interviews with 60 entrepreneur-mothers to refine conceptual understanding of independence.

The authors find that entrepreneur-mothers experience independence not as an opportunity, but as a functional necessity in managing the temporal and perceived moral demands of motherhood. The authors assert that there is a fundamental difference between wanting independence to pursue a more autonomous lifestyle, and needing independence to attend to family obligations, a difference that is not adequately captured in the existing conceptualisation of independence. Consequently, the authors propose the classification of “family-driven entrepreneurship” to capture the social and institutional factors that may disproportionately push women with caregiving responsibilities towards self-employment.

This paper proposes that a new category of entrepreneurial motivation be recognised to better account for the social and institutional factors affecting women’s entrepreneurship, enabling policymakers to more accurately position and support entrepreneur-mothers.

The authors challenge the existing framing of independence as an agentic opportunity-seeking motive, and seek to incorporate family dynamics into existing entrepreneurial models.

This paper delivers much-needed conceptual refinement of independence as a motivator to entrepreneurship by examining the experiences of entrepreneur-mothers, and proposes a new motivational classification, that of family-driven entrepreneurship to capture the elements of agency and constraint embedded in this transition.

OUR readers are sure to find the New Year, which we hope will be a prosperous one for them and for librarianship,an interesting one in many ways. From the standpoint of the Library Association it will see the attractive experiment of an Annual Conference which for the first time is to be held in June. Margate, the venue of this, can be spartan in that month; on the other hand, she can be delightful, and the crystal, bracing air of the town, unequalled anywhere in our isles, and the long days, which should be sunny, ought to send librarians back invigorated to the common work of libraries. The objection that June cannot be combined with late summer holidays, that it cuts across school and university terms, and so on, is sound enough, but the advantages seem to be equally clear. At any rate we hope that Margate will be a bumper conference.

Life studies are a rich source for further research on the role of the Afro‐American woman in society. They are especially useful to gain a better understanding of the Afro‐American experience and to show the joys, sorrows, needs, and ideals of the Afro‐American woman as she struggles from day to day.

This chapter shares the challenges that scholars experienced during the pandemic and their responses to them. We find that participants responded to complex work and home challenges through ethics of grit and perseverance. Offering a caution against grit mindsets, we argue that academics would benefit from opportunities to develop fuller forms of resilience. To do so, we recommend that higher education institutions co-construct locally and culturally relevant conceptualisations of resilience and enact trauma-informed practice to better support academic resilience in their faculties.

New horizons are beginning to emerge in terms of matching people and information resources in a networked service environment. Librarians, publishers, subscription agents, database hosts and information service aggregators are now actively engaged in rethinking information landscapes, in harnessing Internet technologies, and in finding ways to link institutional legacy systems to the web technologies in a manner that will appear transparent to the user. There is, as yet, no coherent view of the new service models and this paper attempts to foreshadow a conceptual framework on which to build sustainable service models and technical infrastructure. In doing so, particular attention is paid to the key issues of authentication, authorisation and access management which are basic building blocks for the creation of a secure and efficient networked information service environment. The experiences gained at Macquarie University with projects such as LIDDAS and PRIDE have helped in the development of the ideas presented in this paper.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

This paper commences with a discussion of the findings of research carried out for a PhD into motivators and demotivators linked to information‐seeking behaviour. Library and librarian image was discovered to be both a motivator and a demotivator in the choice of whether or not to use the library or certain information sources. The paper then moves into discussions of our attempts to develop a practical instrument suitable for the evaluation of library and librarian image formation.