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This article presents our experiences of conducting research interviews with Australian academics, in order to reflect on the politics of researcher and participant positionality. In particular, we are interested in the ways that academic networks, hierarchies and cultures, together with mobility in the higher education sector, contribute to a complex discursive terrain in which researchers and participants alike must maintain vigilance about where they ‘put their feet’ in research interviews. We consider the implications for higher education research, arguing that the positionality of researchers and participants pervades and exceeds these specialised research situations.

In our June issue last year we spoke to five librarians from around the world about the library automation systems in place in their libraries, and their thoughts and plans for the future. This year we asked them to take a look back and see what has changed, how much has come true and, again, to give their thoughts on what the future might hold. Min‐Min Chang is Director of the Library at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Library (http://library.ust.hk). Alejandro Leal‐Cueva is in charge of the Library Automation Programme at the University of Nuevo Leon in Mexico (http://ulibarri.bcms.uanl.mx). Lyndall Osborne is Circulation Services Librarian at Maroochy Shire Library Service, Queensland, Australia (http://peg.apc.org/‐maroochy/). Cinda Romuldietz is Automation Supervisor at Saskatoon Public Library, Canada (http://www.sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca/education/spl). Sue Sutherland is Libraries Manager at Canterbury Public Library, Christchurch, New Zealand (http://www.ccc.govt.nz/Library/).

For this month's Focus interview we spoke to five librarians around the world about the automation system used in their library, their opinion of it, and their thoughts for the future of library automation. Lyndall Osborne is Circulation Services Librarian at Maroochy Shire Library Service, Queensland, Australia (http://peg.apc.org/∼maroochy/). Sue Sutherland is Libraries Manager of Canterbury Public Library, Christchurch, New Zealand (http://www.ccc.govt.nz/Library/). Min‐Min Chang is Director of the Library at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Library (http://library.ust.hk/). Cinda Romuldietz is Automation Supervisor at Saskatoon Public Library, Canada (http://www.sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca/education/spl/). Alejandro Leal‐Cueva is in charge of the Library Automation Programme at the University of Nuevo Leon in Mexico (http://ulibarri.bcms.uanl.mx/).

Recent developments in medical treatments have resulted in the increased use of infusion devices for the administration of highly potent drugs. Drug administration is one of the highest risk areas of clinical practice and infusion devices are associated with a substantial number of adverse drug events. Locally, there was a perception that adverse drug events involving infusion devices appeared to be increasing, and there was anecdotal evidence to suggest that the available number of devices was inadequate to meet the increasing demand. A two‐part, observational audit, carried out in an acute district general hospital, was used to identify weak areas in the systems associated with the use of infusion devices and to implement actions to rectify the weaknesses and consequently reduce the risk to patients and staff.

Candida Shallow: What are you doing, Daddy?

The Bertelsmann International Network of Public Libraries was created by the Bertelsmann Foundation of Germany to think flexibly about the public library of tomorrow and to develop model solutions to address the issues faced by public libraries across the world. From the first meeting, topics of relevance to public libraries were discussed and then the first group of participants had to choose a topic to research and create a model which could be implemented in other public libraries. Summaries of all research papers are available on the Internet at www.stiftung. bertelsmann.de Some models are currently being implemented in libraries of the participants and the new members of the Network are currently working on their research.

This paper focuses on accessing the experiences of three boys who are on the autism spectrum to identify what using a voice output communication aid (VOCA), within a classroom setting, means to them. The methods used to identify the boys' perspectives are described and evaluated. Establishing these through direct methods of engagement proved problematic but working with parents and school staff as ‘expert guides’ provided a rich insight into what using a VOCA appeared to mean to the boys. The findings suggest that using a computer‐based VOCA can be viewed by children with autism as a pleasurable and motivating activity. This technology also seems to offer the potential for a much broader developmental impact for these children than that currently recognised within the research literature.

Lawrence Angus is Professor is Head of the School of Education at the University of Ballarat. His most recent book (with Professor Terri Seddon of Monash University) is Reshaping Australian Education: Beyond Nostalgia. His publications include several books over 50 refereed book chapters and articles in academic journals. His particular research and teaching interests include education equity and policy.Eve Gregory is a Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London She joined the Department of Educational Studies in 1987, after having taught for nine years in schools and two years at Nene College, Northampton. During her years at Goldsmiths, she has co-ordinated language and literacy programmes for the BA Ed, taught across Early Years programmes and established student exchanges in France, Spain and Austria. Recent research has included studies on family literacy history, on siblings (both funded by the ESRC) and children’s home and school literacy practices (funded by the Leverhulme Trust).Kathleen Gwinner began her career in education as a high school art teacher in rural areas near Kansas City, Missouri and El Paso, Texas, and then in Houston’s urban schools. Travel and a continuing interest in art history prompted her to return to university for a Masters degree in European history, and she subsequently taught history and art history courses at private and public schools with a great variety of student populations. Her doctoral research was conducted at a specialized vocational school within the Houston metropolitan district where she was a teacher. She now teaches at a school for the gifted and talented where she is continuing her research on high achieving girls.Martyn Hammersley is Professor of Educational and Social Research, Faculty of Education and Language Studies, the Open University. His early work was in the sociology of education. Much of his more recent work has been concerned with the methodological issues surrounding social and educational research. He is currently investigating the representation of research findings in the mass media. He has written several books, including: (with Paul Atkinson) Ethnography: principles in practice (Routledge, 1995); The Dilemma of Qualitative Method (Routledge, 1989); Reading Ethnographic Research (Longman, 1998); What’s Wrong with Ethnography? (Routledge, 1992); The Politics of Social Research (Sage, 1995); (with Peter Foster and Roger Gomm) Constructing Educational Inequality (Falmer, 1996); Taking Sides in Social Research (Routledge, 1999); and Educational Research, Policymaking and Practice (Paul Chapman, 2002).Sam Hillyard is a lecturer in sociology at the Institute for the Study of Genetics, Biorisks and Society and a member of Nottingham’s Institute for Rural Research. Her research interests include ethnographic research and theorising; the Sociology of Education; the history of symbolic interactionism and the sociology of Erving Goffman. At Nottingham, she teaches rural sociology and recently finished a research project studying images of farming in children’s literature.Caroline Hudson is Basic Skills Advisor in the Home Office National Probation Directorate. Caroline has published on offending and education, evidence-based policy, and family structure (intact nuclear, reordered nuclear, single parent and care) and young people’s perceptions of family and schooling. Her principal research interest is issues related to social exclusion. Prior to working in the Home Office, Caroline was a researcher at Oxford University Department of Educational Studies and Oxford University Centre for Criminological Research. Before doing a Master’s and doctorate at Oxford University, Caroline was a secondary school English teacher for 12 years.Bob Jeffrey’s ethnographic research at The Open University has focussed on the effects of policy reform and managerialism on the creativity of primary teachers in England. Together with Peter Woods, he has identified their dilemmas and tensions, their creative responses, identity reconstructions, and changes in professional role. He has, together with Geoff Troman, and Dennis Beach, established an extensive European network of ethnographic research interests and his current research project involves ten European partners focussing on the student’s perspectives of their learning experiences with particular reference to their creativity. He has maintained a regular flow of articles concerned with ethnographic methodology.Susi Long is an Associate Professor in Early Childhood Education and Language and Literacy at the University of South Carolina in the U.S. Her research interests include language and literacy learning in marginalized populations and teacher education. In 1997, she received the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Promising Researcher Award for her ethnographic study of cross cultural learning in Iceland. She continues similar work in the United States with projects that include a study of professional development at the University of South Carolina’s Children’s Center, a six month study of Mexican American kindergartners, and a long-term study of new teachers during their first three years of teaching. Key publications can be found in the journals, Research in the Teaching of English; The Journal of Teacher Education; Reading, Language and Literacy; NCTE’s Primary Voices; and in an upcoming issue of the NCTE’s Language Arts. Her most recent work is coedited with Eve Gregory of Goldsmiths College and Dinah Volk of Cleveland State University. The volume, Many Pathways to Literacy (Routledge Falmer, 2004) is a collection of studies that illuminate mediators of language and literacy learning in the lives of young children across a range of cultural settings in the U.S. and in the U.K.Colton Paul worked as a primary school teacher for a number of years in the London Borough of Haringey and Tower Hamlets. He is now employed as a lecturer at Goldsmiths College educational department. Colton Paul is primarily concerned in his research with culture, identity and education, in particular the ways in which notions of race, power, and representation interact to influence cognitive development. his current area of research for his PhD thesis is focused on the effects of mythologies and power relations on the educational development of children of Caribbean heritage.Ilana Snyder is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia. Her research focuses on changes to literacy, pedagogical and cultural practices associated with the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Four books, Hypertext (Melbourne University Press & New York University Press, 1996), Page to Screen (Allen & Unwin and Routledge, 1997), Teachers and Technoliteracy (Allen & Unwin, 2000), co-authored with Colin Lankshear, and Silicon Literacies (Routledge, 2002) explore these changes. In collaboration with Simon Marginson and Tania Lewis, her current research includes a three-year Australian Research Council-funded project examining the use of ICTs in higher education in Australia. The focus is on innovation at the interface between pedagogical and organisational practices. She is also working on the application of Raymond William’s ideas about technology and cultural form to a study of the Internet.Ruth Silva teaches at the College of Education, University of North Texas having completed her doctorate in teacher education at the University of Houston. She has been a teacher and administrator in high schools in Australia and an administrator with the Department of Education (Independent and Catholic Schools) in Sydney. Her research focuses on the role of the classroom teacher as researcher, instructional supervision, and pre-service teacher education.Katie Van Sluys is a doctoral research student at Indiana University.Ilana Snyder is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia. Her research focuses on changes to literacy, pedagogical and cultural practices associated with the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Four books, Hypertext (Melbourne University Press & New York University Press, 1996), Page to Screen (Allen & Unwin and Routledge, 1997), Teachers and Technoliteracy (Allen & Unwin, 2000), co-authored with Colin Lankshear, and Silicon Literacies (Routledge, 2002) explore these changes. In collaboration with Simon Marginson and Tania Lewis, her current research includes a three-year Australian Research Council-funded project examining the use of ICTs in higher education in Australia. The focus is on innovation at the interface between pedagogical and organisational practices. She is also working on the application of Raymond William’s ideas about technology and cultural form to a study of the Internet.Wendy Sutherland-Smith is a lawyer turned teacher and an Associate- Lecturer in the Faculty of Business and Law at Deakin University. She has taught in secondary and tertiary institutions for the past fourteen years. Currently, she is teaching Corporations and Business Law to international students, whilst also undertaking doctoral studies in the Faculty of Education at Monash University in Australia. Her Ph.D is a cross-disciplinary investigation of notions of plagiarism, from perspectives of Legal and Literary theory. She is particularly interested in the Internet literacy practices of tertiary undergraduate ESL students. In her doctoral work, Sutherland-Smith is focuses on Bourdieu’s notions of symbolic violence, cultural capital, habitus and field. She applies these critically in analyses of international ESL students’ academic writing, both print-text and Web-text based, with respect to plagiarism and intellectual property. She has published articles in The Reading Teacher (2002), Prospect (2002), and TESOL Journal (2003) on her research of international students’ reading practices in paper-text compared to hyper-text environments. She has also published in the broader area of the nexus between linguistic and legal theory. Her email address is wendyss@deakin.edu.au.Dinah Volk is a Professor and Coordinator of the Early Childhood Program, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA. She has taught young children in the U.S. and Latin America and her research interests include sibling and peer teaching and the language and literacy practices of young bilingual children and their families. Volk is co-editor, with Gregory and Long, of Many Pathways to Literacy: Young Children Learning with Siblings, Peers, Grandparents, and Communities (RoutledgeFalmer, 2004) and is co-author, with DeGaetano and Williams, of Kaleidoscope: A Multicultural Approach for the Primary School Classroom (Prentice Hall, 1998). Her articles have been published in Research in the Teaching of English, the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, Reading: Language and Literacy, and the Early Childhood Research Quarterly.Geoffrey Walford is Professor of Education Policy and a Fellow of Green College at the University of Oxford. He was previously Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Education Policy at Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham. His recent books include: Affirming the Comprehensive Ideal (Falmer, 1997, edited with Richard Pring), Doing Research about Education (Falmer, 1998, Ed.). Durkheim and Modern Education (Routledge, 1998, edited with W S F Pickering), Policy and Politics in Education (Ashgate, 2000) Doing Qualitative Educational Research (Continuum, 2001) and British Private Schools: Research on policy and practice (Woburn Press, 2003, Ed.). His research foci are the relationships between central government policy and local processes of implementation, choice of schools, private schools, religiously-based schools and ethnographic research methodology. He is editor of the Oxford Review of Education and has recently completed a Spencer Foundation funded comparative project on faith-based schools in England and the Netherlands.Sue Walters completed her DPhil research in the Department of Educational Studies at Oxford University and is now a Research Fellow in the Faculty of Social Sciences, The Open University, Milton Keynes (researching Ethnicities and Contemporary Rural Identities). She was previously a Secondary School English teacher and an English as an Additional Language specialist and has academic degrees in Literature, Women’s Studies and Educational Research Methods. Her current research interests lie in issues concerning academic achievement and Bangladeshi pupils, ethnic minority and bilingual pupil’s experiences of schooling and ethnicities and identities.