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This paper aims to investigate the impacts of service learning (SL) on teaching sustainability competencies in an undergraduate tourism program at Bamyan University, Afghanistan. This study reports on tourism students’ experiences in the SL course which taught five key sustainability competencies (collaboration, values thinking, action-oriented, systems thinking and integrated problem-solving).

This paper assessed students’ perceptions of their sustainability competencies gained during the implementation of the course in 2016 and 2017 through focus groups, reflective essays and participant observation.

The results demonstrate how the SL experience led students to self-discovery, strong conceptualizations of sustainability and working relationships with community stakeholders.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to assess the impacts of a SL course in Afghanistan. The analysis provides valuable information for developing effective higher education programs, relationships of trust between students and community stakeholders and the empowerment of students to contribute to local solutions which serve a role in stabilization efforts in conflict-affected contexts.

The balanced scorecard is gaining momentum as an assessment framework for academic libraries in North America. The purpose of this paper is to examine locally designed assessments available on Association of Research Libraries (ARL) members’ web sites and maps the data to the standard ISO 11620 – Library Performance Indicators (PIs), which is a version of the balanced scorecard. The questions are: first, does data from ARL member web sites cluster round certain ISO 11620 PIs? Second, what implications does data clustering have on internal planning and cross-institutional collaborations? Third, will future standards such as ISO 16439 complement the framework and methods in ISO 11620?

Using the quantitative content inventory and qualitative content audit method, this research analyzes ARL members’ locally designed assessment data. The data grouped within a library category, such as collections, is mapped to PIs found in the ISO 11620.

The locally designed assessment data covers a variety of library processes and maps to many ISO 11620 PIs. From this research libraries can develop methods for tying assessment activities into a comprehensive framework like the balanced scorecard. Using ISO 11620 can advance assessment planning. Implementing this standard can lay the foundation for activities that might arise from standards under development such as ISO 16439 – Library Impact Standard.

This is the first research to gather, exam, and map ARL members’ assessment data to the framework of the ISO 11620 standard.

Crises such as the Coronavirus pandemic pose extraordinary challenges to the decision making in management teams. Teams need to integrate available information quickly to make informed decisions on the spot and update their decisions as new information becomes available. Moreover, making good decisions is hard as it requires sacrifices for the common good, and finally, implementing the decisions made is not easy as it requires persistence in the face of strong counterproductive social pressures.

We provide a “psychology of action” perspective on making team-based management decisions in crisis by introducing collective implementation intentions (We-if-then plans) as a theory-based intervention tool to improve decision processes. We discuss our program of research on forming and acting on We-if-then plans in ad hoc teams facing challenging situations.

Teams with We-if-then plans consistently made more informed decisions when information was socially or temporally distributed, when decision makers had to make sacrifices for the common good, and when strong social pressures opposed acting on their decisions. Preliminary experimental evidence indicates that assigning simple We-if-then plans had similar positive effects as providing a leader to steer team processes.

Our analysis of self-regulated team decisions helps understand and improve how management teams can make and act on good decisions in crises such as the Coronavirus pandemic.

It is common knowledge that the developing countries have needs for expertise in agriculture, technology, medicine and education. But the call for librarians in specialised fields is now being heard increasingly throughout Africa, Asia and South America.