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To provide an in-depth survey and review of innovation in library and information services (LIS) and to identify future trends in innovative research and its practical application in the field.

An in-depth review and summation of relevant literature over the last twenty years, along with an analysis and summary of the other papers in the volume.

Innovation in library and information work varies between the evolutionary and the discontinuous. A taxonomy of innovatory approaches to development and provision in the sector is provided, along with a detailed listing of the key elements of successful and not-so-successful innovative practice.

The work is dependent on existing literature rather than direct empirical work. However, because it draws together all major aspects of the topic, it has the potential to be used as a springboard for further generic studies and also specific programmes of work.

The need for innovation in LIS will be ever more pressing. The present chapter provides a necessary and rigorous overview of the necessary elements required for success in this area. It will be useful as a reference tool for intending researchers in library and information provision in a wide range of environments.

Because the chapter brings together a substantial body of information on the topic of innovation, it provides a comprehensive study of major developments and likely future trends in the field.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

This chapter reviews the safety of railway operation in Europe particularly by examining the causes of fatalities over periods of up to three decades ending in 2017. Fatalities are examined to passengers, staff, level crossing users, and trespassers, together with a brief look at suicides. The accidents that attract most attention are fatal train collisions and derailments because they can result in multiple fatalities, and are in most cases wholly the responsibility of the railway operators. However, train accidents are infrequent, and account for only about 1% of all railway fatalities if suicides are included, or 3% if they are not. The fatal train accident rate per train-kilometre fell at a rate of 5.4% per year between 1990 and 2017 and was 77% lower in 2017 than it had been in 1990. This chapter goes on to discuss level crossings, which account for far more fatalities than train accidents, personal accidents, accidents to trespassers, and suicides. This chapter ends with a brief look at the evidence of the effect of rail restructuring on safety.

Many evaluation paradigms consider three rather similar concepts: input; implementation; and output. Until recently, little attention has been paid to the implementation phase of evaluation, which seems to be a critical area in need of assessment by both administrators and evaluators. The literature relating to implementation has tended to document the need for implementation studies, but has not been very useful in describing, in practical terms, how one may go about the process of assessing implementation or the subsequent use of such data for administrative feedback. This paper discusses the development and use of an implementation scale and describes basic characteristics of the instrument. Some obtained data are presented and possible interpretations of the data offered. The data would seem to indicate that instructional systems are not implemented fully in many schools. A second section of the paper presents correlational data obtained from the implementation instrument and variables that may be related to the degree of implementation of a classroom innovation. The innovative nature of the school, the climate established by the administrator, the existence of continuous training programs and staff and student attitudes were found to correlate significantly with degree of implementation.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate whether an example of Seclusion Room Contactless Monitoring Technology (VitalGuard^TM) is able to accurately detect the presence of life in a ward seclusion room ensuring patient wellbeing, without interference from background “living noise” (e.g. voices) or “electronic noise” (e.g. other systems).

The authors assessed the system’s ability to monitor movement caused by human respiration through its ability to discriminate false positives (i.e. presence of an inanimate object ± movement or noise, in the absence of a person in the seclusion room) and false negatives (i.e. failure to detect a human presence) in a ward setting.

The system displayed 100 per cent validity in terms of determining false positives (six conditions, each n=5) and the system did not alarm under either of the two false negative conditions tested (each n=5).

These findings demonstrate that this example of technology is able to monitor movement caused by human respiration and can accurately and reliably detect the presence of life in seclusion rooms, in the ward setting, without interference from background noise (living and electronic). This was a small evaluation study and further research on its effectiveness in practice would be beneficial in both the intellectual disability forensic setting and other settings of segregation and isolation.

This study suggests that the use of technology in a seclusion room setting can be used as a reliable tool to enhance patient observations and assist in the delivery of care in a safe and unobtrusive manner.