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We publish below two papers given on 21 July 1987 at a seminar “Joint Enterprise: Roles and Relationships of the Public and Private Sectors in the Provision of Library and Information Services.” The seminar was organised by LISC and BL in conjunction with William Dawson and Sons Ltd.

This paper is based on public library experience and draws mostly on Devon but aims to cover themes and messages which apply equally to other libraries and information services.

THE BIAS towards the shires in the rate‐support grant for the next fiscal year has brought benefit, albeit of a negative kind, to one county librarian to whom I was chatting recently, who has to face a cut in his budgets of ‘only about £60,000’, which is some 3% of his total. We agreed ruefully that in real terms public libraries have had to live with annually reducing expenditure for at least a decade, and that 3% next year was at least manageable, if no great stimulus to morale.

This paper aims to explore how team processes relate to employee team learning that leads to innovation in higher education (HE) and provides leaders with an adaptable model with recommendations for implementation.

This research was guided by theories of experiential learning, action learning and organizational learning, as well as change theory and design thinking. The process and results are grounded in mixed methods action research including document analysis, interviews, observations and surveys. Team-level data were analyzed using content analysis, process analysis, frequency analysis, descriptive statistics, Cronbach’s alpha and Wilcoxon signed-rank.

Universities struggle to prioritize proactive approaches to serving students. This research indicates teams engaging in frequent welcoming, ideating, synthesizing and mentor-seeking behaviors developed higher quality and more innovative proposals for organizational improvement when compared with teams engaging in these behaviors less often. Team member individual innovative ability increased at a statistically significant level after participation.

This research is based on one HE setting in the USA.

The model used in this study could be adapted to fit a variety of contexts especially in HE. Findings could inform training development to facilitate team learning that leads to innovative action.

This study adds to the existing learning organization and HE administration literature by expanding on the role of team behaviors in effective team learning by considering team processes over time. This research adds to a paucity of literature related to employee team learning in HE.

The management of children′s literature is a search for value and suitability. Effective policies in library and educational work are based firmly on knowledge of materials, and on the bibliographical and critical frame within which the materials appear and might best be selected. Boundaries, like those between quality and popular books, and between children′s and adult materials, present important challenges for selection, and implicit in this process are professional acumen and judgement. Yet also there are attitudes and systems of values, which can powerfully influence selection on grounds of morality and good taste. To guard against undue subjectivity, the knowledge frame should acknowledge the relevance of social and experiential context for all reading materials, how readers think as well as how they read, and what explicit and implicit agendas the authors have. The good professional takes all these factors on board.

While weaknesses for students with learning disabilities (LD) may exist in basic reading skills, difficulty understanding text goes beyond reading the words on the page. The complex nature of reading requires educators to provide struggling readers with reading strategies that support active engagement with text, comprehension monitoring, and a means to organize their understanding before, during, and after reading. In this chapter we describe collaborative strategic reading (CSR), a multicomponent model for teaching reading comprehension strategies. CSR has been associated with reading gains for students with LD as well as low- and high-achieving students, and English language learners. We provide information about teaching reading strategies as well as suggestions for overcoming possible stumbling blocks to implementation.

‘WHAT A novel arrangement. Is any reason given?’

NBL branches ‐ The National Book League's pilot attempt to establish a regional branch, master‐minded by Peter Labdon and taking the form of the Ipswich & Suffolk Book League, is already judged sufficiently encouraging for the NBL to seek to spread the process elsewhere in Britain. To which end there has been published a booklet called Branching Out—setting up National Book League local branches: a working handbook, which is obtainable without charge from the Director, Martyn Goff, at the NBL, Book House, 45 East Hill, Wandsworth, London SW18.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and theorize the process of managerial feedback in relation to change in small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

This research embraces a qualitative methodology in the context of manufacturing SMEs. Drawing on 30 in-depth interviews, and observations conducted with various managers in six SMEs operating in three countries, it is argued that managers benefit more by using daily, ongoing, feedback as a trigger of change in their organizations.

The findings suggest that there is an overall view that managers appear to be reluctant to change existing processes using formalized feedback mechanisms, which runs counter-intuitive to the literature. In contrast, informal methods of feedback work better in enhancing organizational change. Moreover, another two features of feedback enhance this process, namely, benefits oriented and confidence oriented. As such, this study contributes to existing knowledge and practice by proposing a three-fold form of feedback through which managers expand their perspectives of feedback from feeding-back to feeding-forward thereby enhancing the opportunities of triggering change.

Feedback should merely be considered as a dynamic and socially constructed managerial practice. A practice where actors not only exchange information and share knowledge, but also act, react and interact with each other as they constantly rethinking the change process. The proposed aspect of feedback emphasizes knowledge therapeutically and in combination with the dialogical discourse (practical illustration) that increases the odds for capturing change as a natural, rather than exceptional.

Practitioners, as such, may wish to consider the terminology used when it comes to studying change and its implementation in a crisis context. Using deformalized managerial feedback mechanisms to tackle a formal phenomenon like “change” could help avoid employees perceiving a negative connotation, causing resistance or confusion and feeling threatened. Therefore, the authors suggest that practitioners, during development initiatives on modernizing or altering organizational processes, consider replacing the term “change” as a formal concept.

It is an investigation from an exploratory perspective in studying and understanding the causes, factors and modalities that trigger managerial feedback toward organizational change in manufacturing SMEs.