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At the recent ALA Annual Conference in San Francisco, I attended the LAMA Systems and Services Section program “Microcomputers and LAN's: Are They a Viable Part of Your Future?” The speakers were Robert Walton, Texas State Library; Carol Wilson, Cleveland County Memorial Library (NC); and Corryn Crosby‐Muilenburg, Humboldt State University (CA).

In this article Professor Perry argues that Plessy v. Ferguson and the de jure segregation it heralded has overdetermined the discourse on Jim Crow. She demonstrates through a historical analysis of activist movements, popular literature, and case law that private law, specifically property and contract, were significant aspects of Jim Crow law and culture. The failure to understand the significance of private law has limited the breadth of juridical analyses of how to respond to racial divisions and injustices. Perry therefore contends that a paradigmatic shift is necessary in scholarly analyses of the Jim Crow era, to include private law, and moreover that this shift will enrich our understandings of both historic and current inequalities.

The purpose of this paper is to recover the narratives constructed by the disaster management policy network in Washington, DC, about the management of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. Recovering and analysing these narratives provides an opportunity to understand the stories constructed about these events and consider the implications of this framing for post-event learning and adaptation of government policy.

This research was conducted through an extended ethnographic study in Washington, DC, that incorporated field observation, qualitative interviews and desktop research.

The meta-narratives recovered through this research point to a collective tendency to fit the experiences of Hurricane Katrina and Sandy into a neatly constructed redemption arc. This narrative framing poses significant risk to policy learning and highlights the importance of exploring counter-narratives as part of the policy analysis process.

The narratives in this paper reflect the stories and beliefs of the participants interviewed. As such, it is inherently subjective and should not be generalised. Nonetheless, it is illustrative of how narrative framing can obscure important learnings from disasters.

The paper represents a valuable addition to the field of disaster management policy analysis. It extends the tools of narrative analysis and administrative ethnography into the disaster management policy domain and demonstrates how these techniques can be used to analyse complex historical events.

Headlines of increasing financial losses caused by natural hazards and the potential impact of climate change on these raise broad interest in risk management. This paper seeks to claim that the existing decision‐making support, for example through spatial planning, can easily integrate risk assessment schemes.

The paper is based on the results of two EU funded research projects and further applications of those – as well as on conclusions drawn from presentations and discussions at the International Disaster Reduction Conference.

Discussion around risk governance highlights the role of integration. This discussion is still very much in need of further development and successful ways to implement integrative, participatory governance.

The research results presented have been elaborated in close cooperation with stakeholders. One example is based on a commissioned EU task that analyzed the effectiveness of European Regional Fund projects in the case of environmental risks. The other one describes how a town council took a decision which was based on information drawn from a project focusing on climate change adaptation.

The paper describes two examples of successful implementation which make us ask if new approaches are actually required or whether current spatial planning and development practices might be sufficient, when properly applied and fine‐tuned, to respond towards natural hazards and climate change impacts.

Research support services (RSS) is an emerging and popular area in university libraries, whose increasing importance has been well documented since the early 2010s. This study aims to identify the status of RSS provided in the university libraries of Pakistan and to compare the results with relevant international studies. The research also reports on the perception of librarians regarding the application of RSS in Pakistani university libraries.

A quantitative survey was conducted of the chief librarians/head librarians working in the 175 university libraries of Pakistan. A structured questionnaire was designed and pre-tested with national and international research experts, faculty members and library professionals. SPSS was used to calculate descriptive statistics. Results of the study were compared with previous literature from an international perspective.

Results of the study indicated that most of the university libraries are providing basic RSS and that they have good collections of both general and subject-specific works to meet the needs of researchers. Most respondents not only were interested in providing RSS but also emphasized that libraries should upgrade their collection to meet researchers’ requirements. However, results of the study also indicated that there was noticeably less support for both the more advanced and newer research support services.

Because the delivery of RSS enables libraries to help meet a university’s strategic research goals, the findings will be of interest to university library and information science executives, policymakers and administration. The suggested recommendations highlight those service areas which are most in need of improvement.

This research provides an updated perspective on the delivery of research support services by university libraries in Pakistan.

Rape culture, described as when “violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent” (Buchwald, Fletcher, & Roth, 1993, p. vii), exists online and offline (Henry & Powell, 2014). Much of the research on rape culture focuses on the experiences of heterosexual women, and few studies have explored rape culture in the context of dating apps. This chapter explores how men who have sex with men (MSM) understand and experience rape culture through their use of Grindr and similar dating apps. A thematic analysis of interviews with 25 MSM dating app users revealed problematic user behavior as well as unwanted sexual messages and images as common manifestations of rape culture on dating apps. Participants explained that rape culture extends beyond in-app interactions to in-person encounters, as evident by incidents of sexual violence that several participants had experienced and one participant had committed. Participants were unsure about the extent to which MSM dating apps facilitate rape culture but asserted that some apps enable rape culture more than others. This chapter demonstrates the importance of investigating sexual violence against people of diverse gender and sexual identities to ensure their experiences are not minimized, ignored, or rendered invisible.

Considering that research data is increasingly hailed as an important raw material for current and future science discoveries, many research stakeholders have joined forces to create mechanisms for preserving it. However, regardless of generating rich research data, Africa lags behind in research data management thereby potentially losing most of this valuable data. Therefore, this study was undertaken to investigate the research data management practices at a Malawian public university with the aim to recommend appropriate data management strategies.

The study is inspired by the pragmatic school of thought thereby adopting quantitative and qualitative research approaches. Quantitative data was collected using a questionnaire from 150 researchers and 25 librarians while qualitative data was collected by conducting an interview with the Director of Research.

Researchers are actively involved in research activities thereby generating large quantities of research data. Although researchers are willing to share their data, only a handful follow through. Data preservation is poor because the university uses high risk data storage facilities, namely personal computers, flash disks, emails and external hard drives. Researchers and librarians lacked core research data-management competencies because of the lack of formal and information training opportunities. Challenges that frustrate research data-management efforts are many but the key ones include absence of research data management policies, lack of incentives, lack of skills and unavailability of data infrastructure.

The study's findings are based on one out of four public universities in the country; hence, the findings may not adequately address the status of research data management practices in the other universities.

Considering that the university under study and its counterparts in Malawi and Africa in general operate somewhat in a similar economic and technological environment, these findings could be used as a reference point for other universities intending to introduce research data management initiatives.

With seemingly limited studies about research data management in Africa and particularly in Malawi, the study sets the tone for research data management debates and initiatives in the country and other African countries.

Drawing from research on art integration, we discuss why visual arts and social studies can be powerful partners in promoting critical thinking skills. Because this is an increasingly visual society, visual literacy is becoming progressively more important. Through the visual arts, students have the opportunity to analyze and evaluate information, which are critical academic and citizenship skills. The integration of these two content areas and skills facilitates effective use of the limited time teachers have with students. In order to demonstrate the integration of art and social studies, we provide a lesson plan on Western Expansion.

This paper develops a comprehensive multidimensional legitimacy model that provides a generic framework for exploring legitimacy in institutions – including the legitimacy of rules, codes, collective activities and organisations themselves. Through the use of 10 dimensions, covering concerns with fairness, efficacy, integrity, expectations, inclusive decision-making and more, the model aims to capture the full suite of distinct features that may be morally relevant in any given case. Each dimension is a continuum and can provide reasons for moral challenge, toleration or pro-active support. The model can be used to diagnose ethical risk areas, to compare reform initiatives and to inform empirical studies of descriptive legitimacy and the social licence to operate. It may also be used as an applied ethics methodology to evaluate overall institutional moral legitimacy; the paper discusses the contextual judgments required for this, including the way that some legitimacy factors can operate as defeaters, such that a serious failure on a pivotal dimension cannot be overcome by support from other dimensions.