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The purpose of this study was to explore the views of autistic people, carers and practitioners regarding the barriers autistic employees face at work (Study 1) and to use these views to inform the design of an employment programme for autistic employees without learning disabilities (Study 2).

In Study 1, 16 (20%) carers, 17 (21%) practitioners and 47 (59%) autistic adults who had been or were currently employed, answered a survey regarding barriers at work. Study 2 evaluates the efficacy of a set of profiling assessment tools (PA) developed to help employers make individually-tailored adjustments for their autistic employees by delivering an employment programme consisting of 15, 8-week work placements.

In Study 1, only 25% of autistic adults reported having had adjustments in the workplace and all groups reported this as the main barrier – alongside employers’ lack of understanding. Two sets of results demonstrate the efficacy of the PA tools in addressing this barrier. First, a comparative cost simulation revealed a cost-saving in terms of on-job support of £6.67 per participant per hour worked relative to published data from another programme. Second, 83% of autistic employees reported having had the right adjustments at work.

This is an exploratory study that did not include a comparison group. Hence, it was not possible to evaluate the efficacy of the PA tools relative to a standard employment programme intervention, nor to assess cost reduction, which currently is only estimated from already available published data.

Overall the findings from these studies demonstrate that the time invested in the high-quality assessment of the profile of autistic employees results in saving costs over time and better outcomes.

The originality of the Autism Centre for Employment programme resides in that, unlike other programmes, it shifts the focus from helping autistic employees to helping their employers.

Web‐based online public access catalogues (OPACs) began to appear in the late 1990s and many libraries are currently considering implementation. As catalogues, they demonstrate advances on traditional OPACs, especially in terms of remote access by users and their potential to integrate many document types and sources via a single interface. This paper considers some of the features and functions of Web OPAC interfaces. As yet, very little evaluation of systems and users has taken place and until more such literature appears, a general approach to products available is considered to be of value. Six popular Web OPAC interfaces in use in UK academic libraries (Talis, INNOPAC, WebCat, Voyager, GeoWeb and ALEPH) have been examined with an overview of the functions offered via those interfaces. A checklist has been developed as an indicator of the important features and functions offered.

A method for the automated preparation of a publication‐quality author and subject index to students' dissertations is described. A datafile of bibliographic data with up to five descriptors was converted to an intermediate text file by a dBase III+ command program, and transferred from an IBM compatible computer to an Apple Macintosh, where formatting for printing was completed automatically by using Aldus PageMaker paragraph tags.

In the Summer 85 issue of Women in Management Review we reported that the Equal Opportunities Commission had found that the Leeds Permanent Building Society had been practising discrimination by imposing a job mobility requirement.

I began my research at two suburban high schools in the spring of 2000, shortly after the one-year “anniversary” of the Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colorado. On April 20, 1999, Dylan Kelbold and Eric Harris entered their school and killed 10 classmates and 1 teacher, wounded 23 others, and then took their own lives in the library. It was the worst mass murder ever to take place on school grounds in the United States. I was particularly interested in looking at suburban schools during this time period because statistics showed juvenile crime, and in particular violence within the school systems, was on the decline, yet the perception of school violence seemed unrelated to these statistics (Brooks, Schiraldi, & Ziegenberg, 2000; Cook, 2000; Glassner, 1999). Following the widespread national attention given to the Columbine shootings,¹ public polls showed 71% of Americans believed a school shooting was likely to happen in their community (Brooks et al., 2000). A month after the Columbine shootings, a Gallup Poll found 52% of parents still feared for their children's safety at school (Brooks et al., 2000). I was interested in learning how this perception of violence and fear shaped the everyday lives of kids going to schools throughout the United States. I wanted to know how schools dealt with issues of violence and safety at the local level, and in particular, how discipline and punishment was thought about, practiced, and negotiated within public-school settings.

The paper aims to develop a prototype middleware framework between different terminology resources in order to provide a subject cross‐browsing service for library portal systems.

Nine terminology experts were interviewed to collect appropriate knowledge to support the development of a theoretical framework for the research. Based on this, a simplified software‐based prototype system was constructed incorporating the knowledge acquired. The prototype involved mappings between the computer science schedule of the Dewey Decimal Classification (which acted as a spine) and two controlled vocabularies, UKAT and ACM Computing Classification. Subsequently, six further experts in the field were invited to evaluate the prototype system and provide feedback to improve the framework.

The major findings showed that, given the large variety of terminology resources distributed throughout the web, the proposed middleware service is essential to integrate technically and semantically the different terminology resources in order to facilitate subject cross‐browsing. A set of recommendations are also made, outlining the important approaches and features that support such a cross‐browsing middleware service.

Cross‐browsing features are lacking in current library portal meta‐search systems. Users are therefore deprived of this valuable retrieval provision. This research investigated the case for such a system and developed a prototype to fill this gap.

The purpose of this paper is to report the outcomes of a Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)‐sponsored study to determine the current state and trends in different forms of scholarly output used in teaching and research; and the nature and extent of problems associated with their use.

A total of 60 UK HE institutions were chosen at random and a selection of departments within these was contacted. An online questionnaire was distributed to the selected departments; resulting in responses from 304 academics across a broad range of subjects and institution types.

The study showed that printed output was still the preferred option in both teaching and research, although electronic journals now have a well‐established presence. Web‐based material is increasingly provided in teaching and used in research but this includes primarily traditional tools such as reading lists and links to scholarly resources. Some content creation was evident. Use of web 2.0 was not extensive, although respondents were making use of Institutional Learning Environments. Academics were aware of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) issues but not always clear about their responsibilities in this area.

The study revealed an essentially conservative approach to the developments in digital information. This may have been due to the sample size which was relatively small, and the age profile which clustered around the 45‐65 years range. In the case of research the influence of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) was clear.

No equivalent study has been reported on the transition between traditional and new forms of scholarly output used in teaching and research. In this fast developing area this research provides a benchmark for future studies.

The film Storm Center was released in 1956, featuring Bette Davis as a librarian in small town America. The narrative is a parable of anti‐communism in the McCarthy era where the town council tries to remove a book on communism from the library. The librarian opposes this and is fired. The details and consequences provide a rich framework for a discursive approach to the text. A discursive approach is chosen because of the film’s extensive use of thematic oppositions around the central concern of censorship and freedom of information. A number of discourses are briefly explored including: femininity; the individual and the group; emotion and scientific rationalism. Concludes that qualitative work in library and information studies might benefit by considering the type of questions posed by discourse theory, as outlined here.