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The purpose of this paper is to assess the use of journal‐ranking lists for academic librarian promotion and tenure (P&T) decision.

Using a case study, the researchers analyzed a proposed journal‐ranking list created for P&T decisions. A quantitative analysis of peer‐reviewed journal articles was performed to support this analysis.

The paper shows that the use of journal‐ranking lists for P&T decisions inadequately conflates academic librarians with teaching faculty members.

The study relied primarily on a single case study, so it may not be scientifically generalized.

This study identifies journal‐ranking lists as an inadequate tool for the evaluation of academic librarians and encourages action to divorce the valuation of intellectual achievement from quantitative structures.

The analysis of the quantitative/metric underpinnings of intellectual labor in higher education is necessary for academic freedom.

The purpose of this paper is to report on the use of the critical interpretive synthesis (CIS) method as a potential tool for aiding library selection decisions.

CIS was used to model research trends in the intersection of journalism and popular culture using presentation titles collected from five years of Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference programs (2007‐2011).

CIS was determined to be effective for focusing a subject selector's current awareness activities.

Considering the limited information provided in the PCA/ACA programs, the researchers were required to analyze the intent of many of the presentations from their titles and the titles of the sessions where they were given.

CIS is a flexible means of systematically producing explanatory theories directly from the data that, while new to library and information science, is useful for modeling cutting‐edge research for current awareness activities.

This qualitative study aims to analyse veteran academic librarians’ perceptions of librarianship to develop a grounded theory that models this group’s understandings of the profession. In addition, this study compares its findings to a previous grounded theory study that modelled novice academic librarians’ perceptions of the profession.

Using the long interview technique, the analysts interviewed 15 veteran academic librarians, i.e. those with 10 or more years continuous experience as professional academic librarians, who work in Texas universities and four-year colleges. Qualitative analytical methods were used to develop a substantive grounded theory from the data.

Two theoretical categories emerged that model academic librarian perceptions of the profession: orienting self (and others) to a shifting profession and driving change in the field. These categories depict academic librarianship as a profession focussed on change, and the theory valuates both mentoring and practitioner research as important elements of this change.

The results of the study may provide useful information to help orient librarians new to the field.

There is a dearth of systematic empirical analyses that explores the personal meanings that academic librarians attach to professional identity. This paper works to fill this gap and to complement the existing critical/cultural and quantitative research concerning the professional identity of librarians.

Librarians have been urged to emphasize social justice and human rights issues in their library mission, but they may find themselves challenged to provide additional services, such as access to legal information for those who cannot afford an attorney. Social justice services in libraries are seldom adequately funded and providing services in this area is labor intensive. In addition, there is an emotional intensity in library services for social justice that is often not considered in the initial enthusiasm of providing services in this area. Yet there seems to be no limit to the need. An interesting and useful perspective on how a public agency such as a library responds in circumstances of limited resources and unlimited demand can be found in the book Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Service, by Michael Lipsky. In this perspective, lower level civil servants who interact directly with members of the general public exercise a level of discretion in the amount of services provided and how those services are administered. This chapter explores how this can generate tensions between more traditional library bureaucracy and social justice services, such as providing public access to justice resources in law libraries. However, the “street-level” response is evolving into a sustainability perspective as librarians embrace a more social justice–oriented outlook in library service planning.

Progress meetings provide a central forum for requesting and exchanging the information necessary for the successful completion of construction projects. Although common to the majority of projects, little is known about the interaction between participants during these meetings. Reviews appropriateness of methodologies for the study of group interaction and discusses the problems encountered when piloting them. The review led to a focus on Bales’ interaction process analysis (IPA) as an appropriate methodology for observing, analysing and interpreting social interaction in small groups. Pilot testing and subsequent use found the method to be reliable and robust. Bales’ IPA was used to categorise and quantify communication acts of 30 site‐based progress meetings. Results indicate that the management and design team interaction is subject to interaction norms: this is predominantly task‐based, but subject to outbursts of emotional interaction, which was found to be very influential on the groups’ behaviour.

We have reprinted the powerful letter addressed to the Daily Mail by MR. H. W. WILSON, the author of “Ironclads in Action,” advocating the immediate adoption of a policy of reprisals for the Zeppelin murder raids. In our view it is the duty of every journal, whatever may be its raison d'être, to assist in keeping the attention of the public fixed upon this matter, to aid in preventing the general feeling of disgust and indignation from cooling down, and to support those who have the brains to understand the nature of the Hun in their efforts to compel the Government to adopt the most effective means at present available to put an end to the murderous excursions of the German vermin into this country. As MR. WILSON points out, the deliberate Hun policy of slaying women, children and non‐combatants is either permitted by the laws of war recognised by civilised nations or it is not permitted by those laws. If it is permitted, “then clearly the Power which refrains from making similar attacks on the enemy's towns, villages, and residential districts, loses greatly from the military standpoint.” If it is not permitted then the only course— “the force behind the laws of War”—is a policy of drastic reprisals. Moreover, it is the only course that the Hun can understand. The methods of “frightfulness” are definitely laid down in the German military system as methods to be ruthlessly followed whenever this can be done with impunity and the fear of reprisals is also definitely laid down as the only consideration which is to be allowed to operate as a check upn “frightfulness.” “The Power which fails to take reprisals when a great offence is committed is as the negligent judge or the faithless jury that acquits a murderer. It sins against humanity … it encourages the criminal in his crime.”

This chapter addresses the alienability or inalienability of the bodily self by looking at continuing legal, economic, and cultural issues surrounding three case studies: the growth of cell lines, live organ transfer, and the practices of “forced prostitution” as a contemporary form of slavery. The essay contends that it is, ironically, Locke and Hegel's shared hyperliberal notion of the self as inalienable property that sustains a potential basis, in law and in culture, for troubling cases of self-alienation which persist in the case studies offered.

This study builds on a first study by Macdonald and Birdi (2019) that argues the concept of neutrality within library and information science (LIS) demands a sensitivity to context often omitted in existing literature. This study aims to develop the conceptual architecture of LIS neutrality in a way that is more conducive to reconciling the contextual nuance found in within the first study.

The approach taken develops LIS neutrality through a Wittgensteinian lens. Two distinct ideas are explored. First, Wittgenstein's notion of a “grammatical investigation” is used to map the varied contexts in which neutrality is used within professional practice. Liberal neutrality is explored as an analogy to lend plausibility to the concept's heterogeneity. Second, Wittgenstein's “family resemblance” develops the concept in a way that facilitates greater contextual understanding.

Three features of liberal neutrality literature: conceptual heterogeneity, distinct justifications for specific conceptions and the possibility that neutrality may operate with limited scope are applied to LIS neutrality. All three features successfully translate, leaving “latent conceptual space” to understand LIS neutrality as nuanced and multifaceted. Second, “family resemblance” also translates successfully, bringing its own pedagogical benefits.

This study's originality lies in its development of LIS neutrality using a descriptive Wittgensteinian lens. Understanding the concept via this paradigm may facilitate a more productive discussion of LIS neutrality and pave the way for a new, less polarised, normative response to it.

THE speech made by Lord Rosebery at the opening of the new Mitchell Library at Glasgow on October 16th has provoked a great deal of interest in the question whether books can ever really be considered “dead.” Lord Rosebery, in endeavouring to avoid the Scylla of platitude, foundered on the Charybdis of exaggeration. “I know,” he said, “I ought to feel elated at the fact that there is this number of books compressed within these walls, and that a number of people will take advantage of them and read them. I ought to, but I do not, I feel an intense depression at this enormous mass of books, this cemetery of books, because after all most of them are dead. I should like to ask Mr. Barrett in all his experience how many really living books there are in all the Mitchell Library? How many time‐proof books—I should rather call them weather‐proof books—are there in all the Mitchell Library? You have told me it has 180,000 books. This morning I asked him if there were not 100,000 that nobody ever asked for, and he declined diplomatically to reply, but if it be true and the percentage of living books be exceedingly small—and I am afraid we must all agree that it is very small, we cannot test the life of a book until after two or three generations have passed—if the number of living books is exceedingly small in proportion to the whole, what a huge cemetery of dead books or books half alive is represented by a great library like this. Of course, some of them are absolutely dead books that no human being out of a madhouse would ask for. Some are semi‐living, some strayed reveller or wandering student may ask for them at some heedless or too curious a moment. The depressing thought to me in entering a great library of that kind is that, in the main, most of the books are dead. Their barren backs, as it were, appeal for someone to come and take down and rescue them from the passive collection of dust and neglect into which most of them have deservedly fallen … Just think what a great mass of disappointment, what a mass of wrecked hopes and lives is represented by a Public Library. Here you have folios which our generation cannot handle, novels as vapid as soda‐water which has been open for a week, bales of sermons which have given satisfaction to no one but their authors, collections of political speeches even more evanescent than the sermons, bales of forgotten science, superseded history, biographies of people that nobody cares about—all these are the staple of the Public Library.”