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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of the new e-lending scheme on the users of libraries operated by Derbyshire County Council.

A web-based questionnaire was distributed to current and recent users of the e-lending service, and 452 responses were obtained.

The service is very highly valued, and its users would wish it to be continued and, if possible, extended and improved, most obviously by increasing the stock. The principal motivating factors for use of the service are convenience and time-saving, as opposed to physical remoteness from a library or accessibility issues.

This is one of the first, and the largest, surveys in the UK of a public library e-lending service, and it provides guidance for the future development of such services.

There is a strong interest in the quality of children's diets as this can impact on current and future health. The aim of this paper is to review current and past literature on UK children's diets to evaluate the adequacy of nutrient intakes in comparison with recommendations, and to identify population groups that may be at particular risk of nutritional deficiencies.

A literature review was carried out to locate and summarise up‐to‐date published studies and reports which addressed dietary intakes of UK children, trends overtime and current dietary issues.

Although UK children's diets appear to have improved in recent years, intakes of several key nutrients remain below dietary recommendations. Iron, calcium, magnesium, potassium and zinc are especially low in some groups, whilst intakes of saturated fat and sugar exceed current targets. Thus, further improvements are needed. In the meantime, parents may consider giving children a daily multi‐vitamin to ensure that micronutrient recommendations are achieved. The lack of child‐specific targets for fibre, long‐chain omega‐3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (LCn3PUFA), vitamin D and fruit and vegetables portions makes it difficult to properly evaluate children's diets for these important dietary components.

Future studies should use consistent age ranges and methods of dietary assessment to enable better comparisons. Research is needed to underpin child‐specific dietary guidelines for LCn3PUFA, fibre and vitamin D.

This paper gives a concise, up‐to‐date overview of the current diet quality of UK children.

Advice about the role of eggs in the diet has changed several times over the decades. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate published evidence reporting associations between egg consumption, egg nutrients and health.

The scientific literature was searched using Medline and key words relevant to eggs and egg nutrients. In addition, a new secondary analysis of the UK National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS) was undertaken to examine nutritional and health differences between consumers and non‐consumers of eggs.

Eggs are a rich source of protein and several essential nutrients, particularly vitamin D, vitamin B12, selenium and choline. Emerging evidence suggests that eating eggs is associated with satiety, weight management and better diet quality. In addition, antioxidants found in egg yolk may help prevent age‐related macular degeneration. The secondary analysis showed that regular egg consumers with a low red and processed meat (RPM) intake ate healthier diets and had a better micronutrient status than those who did not eat eggs but who had a high RPM intake. It was concluded that egg consumption, at a range of intakes, was associated with nutrition and health benefits.

More research on eggs, and egg nutrients, is needed to confirm the health benefits. Future studies should control for other dietary and lifestyle factors.

This paper develops knowledge about egg consumption beyond cholesterol content and provides new evidence from a secondary analysis of a large national dietary database.

Pregnancy is a time of great physiological change. For this reason, the diet of the mother needs to be tailored and carefully managed. For teenagers, the physiologic adjustments are two‐fold; adolescent growth and physiological changes of pregnancy both need to be taken into consideration. The purpose of this paper is to establish whether pregnant teenagers change their diet after conception and which nutritional adjustments are most likely to be made.

In total, 40 closely‐matched Caucasian participants (20 pregnant and 20 non‐pregnant) were recruited from Wythenshawe Hospital, south Manchester and a local high school within the same district. Each participant was asked to complete a background information questionnaire and four‐day food record diary.

Study findings indicate that the diet of pregnant teenagers are substantially better than that of non‐pregnant adolescents. With the exception of vitamin D, intakes of all nutrients are higher in pregnant adolescents compared to non‐pregnant teenagers (p < 0.05), particularly calcium and iron (p < 0.01). Although under‐reporting must be taken into consideration, the diets of both pregnant and non‐pregnant teenagers appear to be deficient in folate and iron. Nutrition interventions are required to improve the diet of adolescents and reinforce the diet of pregnant teenagers.

Although care is taken to exclude incomplete food diaries, a degree of under‐reporting must be taken into consideration when interpreting these findings.

This appears to be the first UK study to compare the dietary habits of pregnant and non‐pregnant adolescents.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the most important characteristics of functional foods and the motives behind its consumption.

The data were collected in the direct interview. The sample (n=200) consisted of 137 women and 63 men at the age of 18-60 years. The research tool was a questionnaire divided into four sections. The first one included quality attributes. The second one included healthful properties, functional components and carriers. The third one concerned the motives for purchasing functional food and included the consequences and values. In the fourth section the participants were asked about gender, age and education.

Among the quality attributes the research reveals six principal components package of information on healthful properties and nutritional value of the product, attributes of taste, health and safety, practical packaging, freshness, purity and naturalness. In terms of health benefits, two components were distinguished prevention of health problems, strengthening of the body and improvement of its functions. Among functional components, the following were distinguished vitamins and minerals, dietary fibre and Omega-3 fatty acids. As the best carriers the following were recognized: cereal products, dairy products, meat products; mixtures of fruits and vegetables. As the most important consequences motivating people to consume functional food the following were recognized: the health effects of proper nutrition resulting from consciousness raising actions promoting health; and the joy of eating and improvement of the appearance. When it comes to the most important motivating factors, good health, long harmonious life and self-esteem were included. The means to achieve these goals are to be responsible for health.

The key factors determining the functional product and motivating for consumption of functional food may establish a basis for actions related to development and consumption of the food. The understanding of the factors that consumers take into account when choosing functional food will help in shaping the optimal strategies for product development. Learning about the basic motivating factors in consumption may be helpful in the development of healthy nutrition education and promotion programmes. The research may provide valuable support for actions related to food products promotion and marketing.

The government has set challenging targets for the availability of all public services electronically by 2005. This paper describes the strategy adopted by Derbyshire County Council, and the role of the library service within the overall corporate approach. The authority has adopted a “putting people first” change management strategy which places information and communications technology (ICT) development within the broader framework of culture change across the organisation, with the aim of making services more accessible and responsive. The paper describes the success of the library service in recovering from severe budgetary problems to create a network of public ICT provision which has become a national exemplar and shows how this is being used to help deliver the corporate targets for e‐government.

On 31 March this year, an experimental arts and youth centre run by Derbyshire Education Committee was finally closed down. Situated in a mining district of North East Derbyshire, the centre catered chiefly for teenagers from the local pit villages. Tony Trafford, acting warden of the centre for its last year of operation, explains the philosophy which lay behind the work of the centre, and the reasons why it was closed by the education authority.

OUR pages continue the discussion on book‐display, about which all has not been said by any means. The ingenious librarian will always sharpen his wits upon the attracting of readers, and the main problem in the matter is merely: what sort of reader is it most desirable to attract? We do not apologise for this reiteration, because it is the fundamental subject now facing librarians. We are not in the least moved by a comment in a contemporary that we are decrying libraries when we assert, and in spite of him we do assert, that fiction issues nearly all over London show a decline. That decline, we repeat, is due to the slight increase in the employment of readers, and to cheap fiction libraries. What the public librarian has to decide is if he shall compete with such libraries or more definitely diverge from them. If a middle course is preferred—as it usually is by Britons—what is that course? Ultimately, is the educated reader to be the standard for whom the library works, or the uneducated? Or, to put it another way, is the librarian in any way responsible for the quality of the books his community reads? Our readers, young and not so young, are invited to help us to answers to these live questions.

To deepen the understanding and to encourage further research on leadership best practices for sustaining quality improvement in UK higher education institutions (HEIs).

The literature on leadership provides the theoretical context for the survey of quality managers from 42 UK HEIs. A mix of questionnaires, interviews, and hypothesis testing, was used to explore the critical factors for effective leadership and to obtain descriptive accounts of leadership best practices, which led to the development of a conceptual framework for effective leadership for academic quality.

Identifies and categorizes leadership practices into “weak”, “good”, “best”, and “excellent” on the basis of efficiency and effectiveness of each practice in sustaining academic quality improvement. It provides a conceptual framework for improving “weak” leadership practices.

The exact nature of the association between “effective leadership” and sustainable “levels of academic quality improvement” has not been explained. This requires further research. International generalization of the findings would require the sample size of 42 UK HEIs to be extended to include institutions from other countries with similar education systems – such as the USA and Australia.

Academic quality planners will become more aware of the need to improve the tasks and activities constituting leadership processes. The emphasis on a structured approach to self‐assessment of leadership performance has the potential to reverse the ranking of leadership second to processes in UK HEIs.

It provides explicit definitions of “weak”, “good”, “best” and “excellent” leadership practices, which UK HEIs adopting the excellence model developed by the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) may find useful in the assessment and improvement of leadership performance towards academic excellence.

A growing body of research seeks to include people with dementia as both participants and co-designers. It is also increasingly recognized that dementia research must pay greater attention to informal care, provided by family and friends in non-institutional settings, because this is the situation of most people affected by dementia. Accessing these kinds of naturalistic care sites through meaningfully inclusive studies can be challenging for researchers in many fields. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This paper describes a methodology designed to facilitate meaningful inclusion and access to hard-to-reach dementia care networks. It describes the implementation of this methodology in the field, the problems that emerged and the lessons learned.

A two-step sampling approach was used. People with dementia were sampled through organizations unrelated to dementia. Care networks were sampled through ecomapping with people with dementia. The strategy successfully accessed the desired population, but it was labour-intensive and biased the sample in several respects.

It is hoped that this outline will encourage further reflection and discussion regarding methodological approaches to complex sampling and recruitment issues in dementia research.