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The development of national capacity to undertake ageing‐related research is vital to ensuring that the challenges arising from an ageing society faced by government, society and individuals are adequately understood and quality of life enhanced. Yet, in the early 2000s there was a danger that previous initial investment in ageing research would be wasted. A campaign was mounted to support newcomers to ageing research, especially those in early career, eventually resulting in Strategic Promotion of Ageing Research Capacity (SPARC). This was a four‐year programme to pump‐prime newcomers to ageing research, to publicise the outcomes of ageing research to all stakeholders and to lobby policy‐makers about the value of ageing research. This end‐of‐programme review suggests that those supported with pump‐priming awards have been fast‐tracked into the highly competitive world of ageing research, that the findings have been very well received and that the advocacy activities have been influential. A new model for promoting ageing research has been established.

The paper aims to describe a framework for a summer research/writing workshop for new university students, and its evolution over time and across institutions.

The University of Toronto at Scarborough (UTSC) has successfully offered its award‐winning two‐day Summer Learning Institute on Research, Writing and Presentation Skills for four years (2004‐2007), to increasing enrolments. Memorial University of Newfoundland (Memorial) adapted the UTSC model and successfully piloted its four‐day workshop, Summer Program in Academic Research and Communication (SPARC), in August 2006. Both programs were low‐cost, non‐credit summer workshops for new students to help them prepare for university‐level research and writing. Memorial offered its program a second time in August 2007. This paper focuses on the Memorial experience.

The success of these programs is attributed to a common framework used in each case: program planning, marketing, and delivery and assessment.

The framework described in this paper could be adapted by other institutions wishing to implement such a program. In addition, the SPARC team will continually improve the program by reflecting on each part of the framework.

Much research has been done to identify and address the specific needs of first‐year university students. For example, some institutions offer “first year experience” courses for credit, while others place first‐year students into Interest Groups. Most academic libraries offer information literacy sessions to groups of undergraduate students during the regular semester. This paper presents a model for reaching first year students before they take their first class at university.

Presents an outline of the organization, SPARC – Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition – which represents a worldwide alliance of libraries and library organizations. Describes how SPARC is developing publishing options to traditional research and scholarly communication while maintaining quality but at more reasonable prices.

This paper describes the development and implementation of Harwell Library's accounting and periodicals housekeeping functions on a microcomputer. The accounting programs were constructed specifically for Harwell Library, but the software for journals was developed as the periodicals module of a suite of library management programs called BookshelF which is commercially available.

Most of the existing software reliability models assume time between failures to follow an exponential distribution. Develops a reliability growth model based on non‐homogeneous Poisson process with intensity function given by the power law, to predict the reliability of a software. Several authors have suggested the use of the non‐homogeneous Poisson process to assess the reliability growth of software and to predict their failure behaviour. Inference procedures considered by these authors have been Bayesian in nature. Uses an unbiased estimate of the failure rate for prediction. Compares the performance of this model with Bayes empirical‐Bayes models and a time series model. The model developed is realistic, easy to use, and gives a better prediction of reliability of a software.

To provide an overview of the growing international movement of librarians, faculty members, and researchers who are working together to develop new methods of scholarly communication, including Open Access (OA) journals, digital e‐print archives, and institutional repositories, and to press for public access to federally funded research.

Key elements which have created pressures for change in the scholarly communication system are reviewed: the development and expansion of the Internet and networked technologies, and rapidly increasing journal costs due to consolidation, pricing structures and title aggregating in the commercial journal publishing industry. Effects of these pressures on libraries, citing Bowdoin College as an illustrative case, and examples of OA and affordably priced journal publishing models and OA principles and infrastructure are presented.

The OA movement has gained momentum and appears to be meeting with some success, with worldwide efforts to make federally funded research available to taxpayers and the largest science, technology and medicine journal publishers revisiting pricing structures. It is predicted that commercial journals, OA journals and digital repositories will continue to co‐exist as information resources for the scholarly community for the foreseeable future.

This is not an exhaustive history, but rather a review of movement highlights, written by a steering committee member of SPARC, a major scholarly communication movement stakeholder.

A useful overview for librarians and researchers unfamiliar with the movement who wish to educate local faculty members about the implications for their publishing and professional activities, as well as for commercial publishers and scholarly presses interested in learning more about the movement.

The structure of health care financing, the lack of vertical and horizontal integration, and the slow translation of basic research into meaningful health outcomes for the population conspire to make innovation in health service delivery a difficult task. However, health service organizations that can more effectively and systematically understand patient needs – needs that are now poorly understood and often unarticulated – have an intrinsic advantage in delivering high value care. This ‐paper aims to describe a program for translating those needs into health services innovations.

The Mayo Clinic, a large integrated multispecialty medical group based in Rochester, Minnesota developed an in‐house design program, the SPARC Innovation Program, to bring design thinking and business analysis together to develop innovations in care delivery. A project example is described to illustrate how designers, business strategists, health care professionals, and patients create new high‐value health care experiences.

The paper finds that health service organizations need to pay more attention to the patient experience if they are to meet patient needs. The design program described here is one approach that organizations can take if they are serious about deeply understanding patient needs and developing innovations to address them.

While the discipline of design is the core of innovation in many industries, it is not widely known or practiced in health service organizations despite a natural affinity between design and medicine. Understanding and employing the power of design in health services will allow medical institutions to develop more effective health services, enhance patient satisfaction, and meet important human needs.

This paper aims to provide details of a major new European robotic research programme and of a recent survey concerning the attitudes of Europeans to robotic technology.

Following an introduction, this paper briefly summarises Europe’s position within the global robotics industry and then discusses the SPARC project. It then examines the finding of a European survey of public attitudes towards robots and concludes with a short discussion.

This shows that the European Union (EU) is a significant force within the global robotics business, and that it is about to embark on its largest ever robotics R&D programme. An EU-wide survey of public attitudes towards robots showed generally positive views but great resistance to the use of robots to care for children, the elderly and the disabled. There was also widespread concern that growing numbers of robots will take jobs.

This paper summarises Europe’s position within the global robotics industry, provides details of the SPARC project and analyses the finding of a European survey into public attitudes towards robots.