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Increasingly, universities are involved in providing leadership development opportunities that support students’ academic endeavours and their personal and professional development, including employability and citizenship skills. Leadership experiences are beneficial not only for students, but also for universities, the wider community, and future employers. To develop a greater understanding of students’ perceived benefits of their involvement in peer leadership activities, a group of Australasian universities participated in a pilot survey based on the United States National Survey of Peer Leadership. Overall, the results suggest students believe they benefit from peer leadership experiences across a range of key outcomes areas, most prominently creative problem solving, appreciation of diversity, and a sense of belonging and contributing to the university community.

The purpose of this paper is to explore empathy in the research process by drawing on findings from interviews to investigate the experience of empathy when two migrant researchers interviewed other migrants. Empathy is an emotion that can be experienced at both the cognitive and affective levels, and which can reflect feelings of sharing and identification.

This paper draws on findings from two separate and distinct but similar research projects, that both used semi-structured interviews to investigate a range of themes about the experience of migration.

During interviewing the researchers experienced empathy when respondents drew attention to particular aspects of their migration experience which were: the challenge of language expression when speaking English as an additional language; feelings of loneliness, including for friends or family; and challenges initiating and enacting friendship following migration. The researchers experienced empathy during interviews; however, they felt challenged by how to respond to these feelings.

This experience of empathy was novel because both researchers were migrants, hence, their emotions were triggered in relation to their own migration as well as that of their participants. Both researchers concluded that their own migration biographies together with their professional role influenced the extent and intensity of their empathy, and the ways that this emotion was handled. This work contributes to an understanding of the reflexivity of the migrant researcher undertaking migration research which has been a previously neglected area.

Parkruns are weekly, free, community-based, 5 km runs around open spaces, with a growing body of research indicating their social, physical and psychological benefits. Thirty-one custodial establishments in England and Wales regularly offer parkruns. The purpose of this paper is to consider prisoners' experiences of parkrun in custodial settings, and these are discussed in the context of the evidence base regarding parkrun in the community and the wider literature on prison sport, desistance, and rehabilitation culture.

Using an inductive, qualitative approach, data was collected at three English prisons, via semi-structured interviews with 24 adult male prisoners who participated in parkrun. Data was subjected to thematic analysis.

In total, five themes reflecting positive experiences associated with custodial parkrun were identified: connection with others; healthy living; a safe and predictable exercise environment; a sense of purpose; and a re-humanising experience. Factors appearing frequently in the wider parkrun research are present in the perceptions of parkrunners in custody. In addition, factors deemed important to desistance and promoting a rehabilitation culture were also found in the experiences of the sample.

The work emphasises the successes of His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) and parkrun working in partnership to support custodial events. By highlighting the positive experiences of custodial parkrun on prisons and prisoners, the authors anticipate that their findings may encourage further sites to consider launching parkrun events and prompt existing sites to consider their events in line with efforts to promote desistance and a rehabilitation culture.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to explore custodial parkrun. The findings indicate that custodial parkrun supports HMPPS strategic goals by offering an opportunity for prisons to promote desistance.

THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF SCOTLAND has three copies of the first quarto (dated 1676) of Sir George Etherege's The Man of Mode, one of the finest and most successful of Restoration comedies. One of these is a prompt copy, a good specimen, prepared with professional skill and thoroughness. It deserves notice for the information which it provides about Restoration stage practice, and for the connexion which it may have with a somewhat obscure episode in the history of the King's Company.

In order to estimate the value of semi-automated subject indexing in operative library catalogues, the study aimed to investigate five different automated implementations of an open source software package on a large set of Swedish union catalogue metadata records, with Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) as the target classification system. It also aimed to contribute to the body of research on aboutness and related challenges in automated subject indexing and evaluation.

On a sample of over 230,000 records with close to 12,000 distinct DDC classes, an open source tool Annif, developed by the National Library of Finland, was applied in the following implementations: lexical algorithm, support vector classifier, fastText, Omikuji Bonsai and an ensemble approach combing the former four. A qualitative study involving two senior catalogue librarians and three students of library and information studies was also conducted to investigate the value and inter-rater agreement of automatically assigned classes, on a sample of 60 records.

The best results were achieved using the ensemble approach that achieved 66.82% accuracy on the three-digit DDC classification task. The qualitative study confirmed earlier studies reporting low inter-rater agreement but also pointed to the potential value of automatically assigned classes as additional access points in information retrieval.

The paper presents an extensive study of automated classification in an operative library catalogue, accompanied by a qualitative study of automated classes. It demonstrates the value of applying semi-automated indexing in operative information retrieval systems.

PROMISING results have been obtained in trials of a method of prelubricating ball bearings at the National Bureau of Standards (U.S. Bureau of Commerce), and the following is a summary of their Technical Report No. 1996.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Term. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

The purpose of this study is to identify motivations for the uptake of crowdfunding by micro-entrepreneurs in an emerging economy and the extent to which these vary by entrepreneur characteristics, sector and crowdfunding model.

The authors conduct qualitative analyses of data collected in interviews with 57 micro-entrepreneurs in Morocco, all of whom used crowdfunding in fundraising.

The authors identify six key motives for crowdfunding adoption by micro-entrepreneurs including financing needs, legitimacy seeking, sense of achievement, network-building, entrepreneurial and marketing competence enhancements. They also find evidence for moderation effects of fundraiser characteristics on likelihood of adoption, including gender, age, education, training experience and sectoral affiliation. Furthermore, the authors show that the relative importance of different motives varies by the type of crowdfunding model used.

The original aspects of the study include the examination of adoption motives in an emerging market context and the distinguishing between entrepreneurs’ adoption motives based on different gender, age, education, training experience, sectoral affiliation and crowdfunding model used. Moreover, the authors show that enhancement of competencies is a more dominant motive in the emerging market context than mentioned in earlier studies in developed contexts.

THE National Reference Library of Science and Invention may be said to be devoted to three R's— reference, research and referral. The purpose of this article is to illustrate this theme, with a picture of the services and activi‐ties of the Library, and to indicate when it can be of help to other libraries. However, it is necessary first to outline briefly the origins and present stage of development of the Library, for despite the amount of publicity it has had, the NRLSI remains relatively little known or little understood compared with the other library departments of the British Museum.

The paper examines how multinational building‐materials manufacturer Lafarge, with more than 77,000 employees operating in four divisions in more than 75 countries, provides its employees with a shared vision of group‐wide ambitions, challenges and opportunities, while still ensuring that they have the detailed knowledge they need to do their own specific jobs.

The paper describes the system of training, with certain Lafarge‐wide programs, others geared to a particular division or geographical area, and a third group dedicated to particular needs revealed during appraisal.

The paper concentrates, in particular, on a CD‐Rom‐based training program designed to increase employees' awareness of quality issues in the Lafarge Gypsum division. Examines the content of the program, its design, and some of the outcomes.

The paper highlights the benefits to Lafarge of having highly diversified career paths and training.

The paper demonstrates that it is possible to develop employees who are highly skilled in a particular area but who still have the company‐wide knowledge and mindset to apply for other jobs outside their immediate division or geographical area.