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Purpose – To highlight ways to overcome challenges in conducting authentic assessments and using data effectively in program planning.

Approach – To help teachers investigate the definition and purpose of assessments available for use in today's diverse classrooms, and use assessment results to inform instruction.

Practical implications – A school team analysis framework focused on teacher collaboration when conducting evaluations of districts' reading programs, a data use cycle, and a reflective questionnaire are provided for professional development.

Social implications – Social justice and differentiated instruction require balanced assessment methods and portfolio use as an implementable and manageable method to document student progress.

Originality/value of paper – This chapter engages teachers in the reality that they can be the driving force behind assessments for learning in their classrooms, schools, and districts.

This paper considers an undergraduate student's coming to, and use of, an ethnographic approach as a particularly appropriate way in which to investigate aspects of life in a British hospital school. Such schools occupy a liminal position with regard to education policy and provision. There is a paucity of research on hospital schools and particularly of the experiences and perceptions of teachers who work in them. This lack of research has implications for policy development. The paper therefore offers some rare insights into one of these schools. It also gives insights into how ethnography can challenge taken for granted assumptions.

An ethnographic participant observer approach was adopted.

This paper gives insights into how ethnography can challenge researchers' taken for granted assumptions as well as offering illustration of some aspects of life in schools.

Although there is an extensive literature on uses of ethnography, this approach has rarely been applied to hospital schools. The paper makes a small step towards addressing this lack.

During the mid 1990s, it was predicted that the library as physical place was doomed. A dualism emerged – the virtual library vs library as place – and it was assumed that the virtual library would prove to be the most popular. In 1995, the State Library of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, produced four scenarios presenting alternative library futures in the twenty‐first century, specifically the year 2010. Only one of these scenarios predicted a reinterpretation and corresponding revitalisation of “library as place”. The author initiated and led this process in 1995 and revisited these scenarios in 2010 with a view to comparing current practices in library design with the attributes described in this lone scenario; the aim of this paper is to focus on this scenario.

Library leaders in Australia, many of whom participated in the 1995 scenario development process, are interviewed, along with a number of architects specialising in contemporary library design. This qualitative process is complemented by an international literature search. Three library sectors are surveyed – collecting institutions, academic and public libraries.

Fifteen years on the dualism between virtual and physical is less stark; a convergence has occurred that would have been unthinkable then. A hybrid has emerged with digital and place‐based notions of a library holding equal currency. Interviewees confirm that “library as place” has never been so popular. This trend is international and emerges from the inter‐weaving of the digital, social and aesthetic that has generated new loci for solitary and collective learning and interaction.

The paper asks questions about what has happened to unsettle predictions conceived in the mid 1990s; what is happening now in terms of new modes of learning and knowledge exchange; and what kind of library spaces and uses can be expected in the future.

The relationships between tourist resorts and transnational crime are rarely analyzed systematically. This paper begins to fill this gap by examining how organized crime groups and individuals linked to them can take advantage of tourist resorts to commit crimes.

MANY and sundry are the worries which fall to the lot of the librarian, and the matter of book‐repair is not the least among them. The very limited book‐fund at the disposal of most public library authorities makes it imperative on the part of the librarian to keep the books in his charge in circulation as long as possible, and to do this at a comparatively small cost, in spite of poor paper, poor binding, careless repairing, and unqualified assistants. This presents a problem which to some extent can be solved by the establishment of a small bindery or repairing department, under the control of an assistant who understands the technique of bookbinding.

Sexual crime in the Irish Free State was more than an issue of law, it carried ideological importance in a nation that legitimised itself as a beacon of Celtic Catholicism whilst struggling to maintain credibility in a contested post-colonial landscape. The nation’s police force, An Garda Síochána, had a central role in preserving the nation’s reputation for piety. This chapter explores the views of two of An Garda Síochána’s most senior officers regarding female sexuality and sexual crime; features that were to influence the level of protection and justice Ireland’s women and children were afforded under law.