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The purpose of this paper is to detail the development and implementation process of a risk management tool that includes the assessment of static and dynamic factors, as well as factors that are both risk related and protective.

Active Risk Assessment System (ARMS) is a tool used to help criminal justice practitioners as they work to support the safe reintegration of those with sexual convictions back into the community.

The tool was developed for use by the police, probation and prison services across England and Wales and this paper outlines the following: the process adopted by the development team in designing the tool, the theoretical principles considered and adopted by the team, and a summary of the early evaluation and recommendations made.

This paper includes some further recommendations for both the developers of the tool and for the police service in England and Wales.

Master and servant — Redundancy — Employment — Contractor's agreement to act as agent for National Coal Board in employing and paying workmen — Workmen's contract of service with board — Contractor acting as employer — Workman unaware of agreement — Payment of wages and giving of statutory notice of terms of employment by contractor — Prejudice to workman by relying on contractor's representation as to employer — Whether contractor estopped for denying himself to be workman's employer.

Details of Some Components Used for Subsidiary Services in Aircraft, Missiles and Space Vehicles. A hose coupling incorporating a pressure controller has recently been produced by Flight Refuelling Ltd., Tarrant Rushton Airfield, near Blandford, Dorset. Because of its position relatively close to the shut‐off valves in the aircraft fuel system, this unit responds more rapidly to pressure changes in the aircraft system than do vehicle‐mounted, venturi‐sensed, pressure controllers.

The New Year will see Britain a member of the largest multi‐national free trade area in the world and there must be few who see it as anything less than the beginning of a new era, in trade, its trends, customs and usages and especially in the field of labour, relations, mobility, practices. Much can be foreseen but to some extent it is all very unpredictable. Optimists see it as a vast market of 250 millions, with a lot of money in their pockets, waiting for British exports; others, not quite so sure, fear the movement of trade may well be in reverse and if the increasing number of great articulated motor trucks, heavily laden with food and other goods, now spilling from the Channel ports into the roads of Kent are an indication, the last could well be true. They come from faraway places, not all in the European Economic Community; from Yugoslavia and Budapest, cities of the Rhineland, from Amsterdam, Stuttgart, Mulhouse and Milano. Kent has had its invasions before, with the Legions of Claudius and in 1940 when the battle roared through the Kentish skies. Hitherto quiet villagers are now in revolt against the pre‐juggernaut invasion; they, too, fear more will come with the enlarged EEC, thundering through their one‐street communities.

The authors wanted to provide an enriched understanding of how lawyers keep up-to-date with legal developments. Maintaining awareness of developments in an area (known as “monitoring”) is an important aspect of professional’s information work. This is particularly true for lawyers, who are expected to keep up-to-date with legal developments on an ongoing basis.

The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with a group of lawyers who authored and published current awareness content for LexisNexis – a large publishing organisation. The interviews focused on identifying the types of electronic, printed and people-based current awareness resources the lawyers used to keep up-to-date with legal developments and the reasons for their choices.

The lawyers mostly used electronic resources (particularly e-mail alerts and an electronic tool that alerted them to changes in website content), alongside interpersonal sources, such as colleagues, customers and professional contacts. Printed media, such as journals and newspapers, were used more rarely and usually to complement electronic and person-based resources. A number of factors were found to influence choice. These included situational relevance, presentation, utility and trustworthiness, the speed of content acquisition and interpretation facilitated by the resource.

The authors' findings enrich their understanding of lawyers’ monitoring behaviour, which has so far received little direct research attention. Their design suggestions have the potential to feed into the design of new and improvement of existing digital current awareness resources. Their findings have the potential to act as “success criteria” by which these resources can be evaluated from a user-centred perspective.

An odd‐sounding expression recently introduced into the language, derived from the passage of events, Privatization, introduced as a rescue operation for sections of public and nationalised industry to hand them over to private enterprise to avoid their destruction and smothering by the unholy wedlock of trade unionism and weak, inefficient management. It frequently met with the opposition of unions and sections of staff. Efforts have been made to sabotage the take‐over and operation of the services by private firms, occasionally making them impossible to operate. This elementary operation was expected to achieve even greater success in the sections taken over and reduced the room for destructive manoeuvring by ajitator, much of which was caused independent of the unions. In the public services some of the antics between rival factions bordered on the ludicrous.

The main objective of this paper is to review work on the usability and impact of digital libraries.

Work on the usability and impact of digital libraries is reviewed. Specific studies on the usability and impact of digital libraries in specific domains are also discussed in order to identify general and specific usability and impact measures.

The usability studies reviewed in this paper show that a number of approaches have been used to assess usability. In addition to the technical aspects of digital library design (e.g. architecture, interfaces and search tools), there are a number of usability issues such as globalisation, localisation, language, culture issues, content and human information behaviour. Digital libraries should, however, be evaluated primarily with respect to their target users, applications and contexts.

Although a digital library evaluation study may have several objectives, ranging from the evaluation of its design and architecture to the evaluation of its usability and its impact on the target users, this paper focuses on usability and impact.

This paper provides insights into the state‐of‐the art in relation to the usability and impact of digital libraries.

Achieving reliable instrument reprocessing requires finding the right balance among cost, productivity, and safety. However, there have been few attempts to comprehensively examine sterile processing department (SPD) work systems. We considered an SPD as an example of a socio-technical system – where people, tools, technologies, the work environment, and the organization mutually interact – and applied work systems analysis (WSA) to provide a framework for future intervention and improvement.

The study was conducted at two SPD facilities at a 700-bed academic medical center servicing 56 onsite clinics, 31 operating rooms (ORs), and nine ambulatory centers. Process maps, task analyses, abstraction hierarchies, and variance matrices were developed through direct observations of reprocessing work and staff interviews and iteratively refined based on feedback from an expert group composed of eight staff from SPD, infection control, performance improvement, quality and safety, and perioperative services. Performance sampling conducted focused on specific challenges observed, interruptions during case cart preparation, and analysis of tray defect data from administrative databases.

Across five main sterilization tasks (prepare load, perform double-checks, run sterilizers, place trays in cooling, and test the biological indicator), variance analysis identified 16 failures created by 21 performance shaping factors (PSFs), leading to nine different outcome variations. Case cart preparation involved three main tasks: storing trays, picking cases, and prioritizing trays. Variance analysis for case cart preparation identified 11 different failures, 16 different PSFs, and seven different outcomes. Approximately 1% of cases had a tray with a sterilization or case cart preparation defect and 13.5 interruptions per hour were noted during case cart preparation.

While highly dependent upon the individual skills of the sterile processing technicians, making the sterilization process less complex and more visible, managing interruptions during case cart preparation, improving communication with the OR, and improving workspace and technology design could enhance performance in instrument reprocessing.

Price stabilization in international commodity markets is a main element of the North‐South dialogue. Within the Integrated Programme on Commodities (IPC) of UNCTAD, it is intended to create buffer stocks for 10 core commodities: sugar, natural rubber, cocoa, coffee, tea, cotton, jute, hard fibres, copper, and tin. Several theoretical studies justify these plans by stressing the positive effects of a functioning buffer stock scheme on different economic goals. It is argued that price stabilization will, “potentially at least, improve aggregate welfare” (Turnovsky, 1978, p. 143) and that risk benefits in the case of risk‐averse producers “will be far more important” (Bigman, 1982, p. 1984; on the concept, see Newbery/Stiglitz, 1981, pp. 267 et seq.) than the transfer benefits, if income uncertainty is reduced by the stabilization policy. Other positive effects of buffer stocks are stressed with respect to food security (Bignan, 1982, pp. 129 et seq.) and, except for the case of supply‐induced fluctuations and a price elastic import demand, with respect to the stability of export earnings (Nguyen, 1980, pp. 343 et seq.). The export earnings stabilizing effect as well as a mostly earnings‐raising effect is confirmed for several core commodities by simulation analyses (Behrman/Ramangkura, 1978, p. 166) and by dynamic optimization (Lee/Blandford, 1980, p. 385). Moreover, stable export earnings of less developed countries (LDCs) are expected to induce higher growth rates of GNP than unstable ones (Lim, 1976, pp. 311 et seq.).

The purpose of this paper is to examine the challenges presented by search engine visibility for public libraries. The paper outlines the results of a pilot study investigating search engine visibility in two Canadian public libraries.

The study consists of semi-structured interviews with librarians from two multi-branch Canadian public library systems, combined with quantitative data provided by each library, as well as data obtained through site-specific searches in Google and Bing. Possible barriers to visibility are identified through thematic analysis of the interviews.

The initial findings of this pilot study identify a complex combination of barriers to visibility on search engines, in the form of attitudes, policies, organizational structures, and technological difficulties.

This paper describes a small, preliminary pilot study. More research is needed before any firm conclusions can be reached.

A review of the literature shows the increasing importance of search engine visibility for public libraries. By delving into the underlying issues which may be affecting libraries’ progress on the issue, this paper may help inform libraries’ decision-making processes and practices.

There has been little original research investigating the reasons behind libraries’ lack of visibility in search engine results pages. This paper provides insight into a previously unexplored area by exploring public libraries’ relationships with search engines.