Search results

The purpose of this paper is to describe the first phase of the SCONUL Value and Impact Programme (VAMP), carried out in 2006.

This paper is a critical review of some of the major tools and methodologies available to measure the value and impact of, particularly academic, libraries, was supplemented by a survey of SCONUL members to ascertain the state of current practice in the UK.

The findings in the paper were synthesised by gap analysis, which found that, although there were some gaps in overall provision, a greater problem was a lack of knowledge and understanding of the tools available, and how they could be applied to demonstrate value and impact.

This paper is a brief description of follow‐up activity and the resulting SCONUL Performance Portal is given.

Stephen Town has been a thought leader and change agent in the academic library world for more than 20 years, who has produced a very large body of work in the areas of quality management and performance measurement that has been disseminated internationally. Town’s retirement from full-time employment at the University of York provides a timely opportunity to review his contribution to the field. The purpose of this paper is to discuss this issue.

The review outlines Town’s career path and professional interests and then appraises his published output, concentrating on his contributions to thinking and practice in the areas of benchmarking, information literacy, service quality, and measuring the value and impact of academic libraries and information services. The discussion is organized thematically to illustrate the evolution and development of his interests and ideas over the review period and also references-related work by other authors to set his work in context.

The study found many examples of innovative and creative work that had influenced thinking and practice in the library profession, including the development of models, frameworks, and tools with the potential to improve the effectiveness of service benchmarking, information literacy education, library advocacy, relationship management, staff evaluation, and impact measurement.

The volume of published work necessitated some selectivity in the material covered, but the review provides sufficiently comprehensive coverage of the areas specified to represent the work effectively.

Town has produced a substantial number of publications as a practitioner-researcher that have not previously been reviewed independently as a coherent body of work.

Whereas the Minister of Labour (hereafter in this Order referred to as “the Minister”) has received from the Boot and Shoe Repairing Wages Council (Great Britain) the wages regulation proposals set out in the Schedule hereto;

Roll up, roll up … the International Online Meeting gets more like a circus every year. This year the ringmaster and some of the performers were seen covered from head to foot in stars and rosettes, making it very difficult to catch a glimpse of the most important part of the meeting — the lapel badges. You have to make sure who has changed companies, sex or name. Those expecting a new big top this year may have been disappointed to find the Novotel just a re‐vamped Cunard. However, we were promised a new improved service, no more ‘ships' museum’, no more escalator, and prime stand space upstairs. But wait, how do I get my trolley full of equipment up to this prime space? Yes, by escalator! It appeared that the easiest way to get your stand installed was by spaceship (or it may just have been the new Pergamon stand).

The contemporary practice of ‘craftivism’ – which uses crafts such as knitting, sewing, and embroidery to draw attention to ‘issues of social, political and environmental justice’ (Fitzpatrick, 2018, p. 3) – has its origins in centuries of radical craft work, where women and marginalised peoples in particular, employed crafts to protest, take a stand, or raise awareness on issues that concern them. This chapter explores how crafts are being used to highlight key social and criminal justice issues that are of concern to criminologists, including the missing and murdered, state and institutional violence, and sexual abuse and violence. In canvassing the ways in which craft is being used to draw attention to, document, memorialise, demand change, and heal, this chapter considers why criminologists would benefit from being attentive to the strategies craftivists are using to challenge the status quo and make visible the invisible.

The figure of the femme fatale is attached to a range of contested meanings around femininity, sexuality and violence. Despite its ambiguity and its origins in art, myth and fiction, the term has proven popular in giving a name to violent articulations of female power in non-fictional settings by journalists. In this chapter, I outline the figure of the femme fatale as an archetype of women's violence that appears throughout Western popular culture, and provide an overview of the term's definitions and cultural meanings. In doing so, I trace the figure's movement across different forms and genres of popular culture. I identify a number of themes in the existing scholarship around the figure: feminist criticism of the figure; the value that feminist film scholars have found in the figure as a symbol of power and sexual transgression; the relationship between the femme fatale, race and the colonial imagination; and the way the idea of the femme fatale has been used in reporting of real-life women's violence.

This study reports on a four-month ethnographic project conducted among young Catholic women in Mumbai, India. Here, the author examines how the media consumption of participants is implicated in reconstituting Indian national identity. Because Hinduism is closely tied to conceptualizations of Indianness and because women continue to be marginalized in Indian society, Catholic women in India are viewed as second-class citizens or “not Indian enough” or “appropriately Indian” by virtue of their gender and religious affiliation. However, through media consumption that emphasizes hybridity, participants destabilize narrow definitions of Indian identity. Specifically, participants cultivate hybridity as central to an Indian identity that is viable in an increasingly global society. Within this formulation of hybridity, markers of their marginalization are reframed as markers of distinction. By centering hybridity in their media consumption, young, middle-class Catholic women (re)imagine their national identity in translocal cosmopolitan terms that subverts marginalization experienced by virtue of their religion and leverages privileges they enjoy by virtue of their middle-class status. Importantly, this version of Indian identity remains elitist in that it remains inaccessible to poor women, including poor women of minority groups.

READ a current Government publication, and you work study technicians can draw the inference that you are feared by managements of the Central Electricity Authority. Those managements have declined to apply work study technique because, the report says: “it is known that it will be difficult to deal with that redundancy when ascertained”. It goes on to say: “In consequence we find that work study, operational research and investigations into restrictive practices are undertaken without enthusiasm.”