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AT THE HOUSING, CARE and Support Journal conference, the theme was the application of best value, the Government's managerial agenda for local government, to housing, care and support. It appears now in published guidance for housing and social services, but while supported housing and community care are well within the scope of best value, the significance is only beginning to be defined. The conference tried to help with this definition and to share the ideas with practitioners so that they could see how it might fit with their own activity. These notes summarise contributions to this conference from Ross Fraser of the Chartered Institute of Housing and Nick Ville of the Audit Commission.

The Audit Commission has recently published a report on the role of housing in community care — an often‐forgotten piece of the community care jigsaw. The message for housing, social services and health professionals is clear: ignore the housing dimension of community care at your peril.

The prevalence and drawbacks of policy borrowing in teacher education are widely acknowledged. In England, there has been extensive use of research conducted in the United States as justification for a prescriptive approach to teacher education nationwide. This raises questions about evidence borrowing from different contexts as a key facet of policy making, with inherent concerns about how the contextual influences on that research influence its effectiveness in transitioning to new spaces. Through the use of spatial theory, this chapter examines this phenomenon and highlights how inferences made from research undertaken in one context, but applied in another, can be detrimental to the established practices and expertise of teacher educators.

In May 1998 I was commissioned by the Mental Health Framework Employment Sub‐Group for Aberdeen to review the current mix of employment services for people with mental health problems and ‐ taking account of previous reviews and proposals for the development of new services ‐ to make recommendations for the establishment of modern, comprehensive, cost effective local services in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a unicorn as a fabulous (ie mythical) animal with horse's body and single straight horn. There is, however, nothing mythical about the Unicorn Collection Management System which is well established in the United States and is now being marketed in Europe. Unicorn is a fully integrated searching and library housekeeping system running under UNIX and incorporating BRS/SEARCH—the powerful information retrieval system—as its searching facility.

“UNDER the clock at Charing Cross Station at 8.30 p.m.” So ran our instructions for Thursday, April 13th. The weather for a fortnight past had brought snow, a wind that was nipping and eager, and weather prophets were not sanguine. One London periodical indeed had burst out with a quotation from Browning adapted to the circumstances:

In France, as in other countries, the idea of installing rooftop photovoltaic (PV) panels in private homes is based on an incentive scheme (tax advantages, feed-in tariffs, etc.) inspired by neoclassical economic theory. In the case of electricity producers in Reunion Island, unlike economists, we argue that producers’ calculations involve decision-making criteria which go further than any simple evaluation of economic costs and benefits.

Our approach is based on concepts of economic anthropology and on observations and semi-structured interviews conducted in the homes of the producers.

This ethnographic method allowed us to examine economic rationalities which revealed the anticipation of an energy landscape that will be subject to issues relating to the environment, access to electricity, evolution in the local electricity market, and household budget management. In this context, producers’ representations of solar power and of processes for commoditizing and decommoditizing the electricity produced (sold on the network/“free” when consumed) make compatible preservation of the environment and social norms of consumption.

This paper focuses on PV energy producers (who have been the object of very little research) and thus provides input for existing reflection on the diversity of economic rationalities. Such insight is important for understanding how people respond to policy appeals for PV panels. Anthropology therefore has an important role to play in the debate on energy transition. This conclusion paves the way for similar research in other contexts (of a non-insular nature in particular) which would allow for a promising comparative anthropological approach.

Interviews ‐ We shall publish from time to time reports of interviews with librarians and others. We shall endeavour to feature librarians in different kinds of work (or none); we shall neither seek out nor avoid the well known, but hope to meet those whose work and view of it will demonstrate that variety which is a characteristic of library and information work.