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This paper aims to examine what elements in online environments promote engagement, learning and repeated visits for children aged 6‐12 years.

An in‐depth textual analysis, exploring components such as navigation, construction of site, character choice and development, style of text, types of questioning, animation, color and other factors, of six English‐language web sites, describing themselves as “educational and fun”, was carried out against a background of literature available on web site design for children, relying particularly on media text analysis and an evaluation method produced in relation to children's motivation and web site use.

The analysis of the six web sites resulted in a number of usability requirements for children's web sites, including the following: web sites should have an understanding of the community of users they serve; web sites should offer dynamic forms of learning; web sites should encourage interaction between users and site designers; web sites should offer open activities rather than closed ones; web sites should view young people as persons with rights.

Insights gained from the analysis of six web sites are hard to generalize. User behavior was not studied.

Web designers should bear the usability requirements in mind when designing web sites for children.

Although educational content for children on the internet is growing exponentially, the area is relatively under‐researched. This is one of the first detailed analyses of entertaining educational web sites targeting children.

This chapter discusses the application of community informatics (CI) principles in the rural Southern and Central Appalachian (SCA) region to further the teaching of information and communication technologies (ICT) literacy concepts in courses that formed part of two externally funded grants, “Information Technology Rural Librarian Master’s Scholarship Program Part I” (ITRL) and “Part II” (ITRL2), awarded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ (IMLS) Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program to the School of Information Sciences (SIS) at the University of Tennessee (UT).

The chapter documents ICT use in ITRL and ITRL2 to extend librarian technology literacy training, allowing these public information providers to become change agents in the twenty-first century. It discusses aspects of CI that influenced these two projects and shaped the training of future rural library leaders embedded in traditionally underrepresented areas to further social justice and progressive changes in the region’s rural communities.

The chapter demonstrates the role that CI principles played in the context of ITRL and ITRL2 from project inception to the graduation of the rural librarians with examples of tangible IT services/products that the students developed in their courses that were directly applicable and tailored to their SCA contexts.

ITRL and ITRL2 provided a unique opportunity to apply a CI approach to train information librarians as agents of change in the SCA regions to further economic and cultural development via technology and management competencies. These change agents will continue to play a significant role in community building and community development efforts in the future.

The paper aims to better understand why borrowers do not sanction one another in group-lending microfinance programmes.

The paper utilises interviews conducted in 16 villages in Western China. The data were complemented by ethnographic fieldwork of an NGO in the region.

The paper confirms the relevance to microfinance of existing literature showing that punishing others is costly, so people tend to wait for others to do it. It also reveals the existence of particularistic metanorms – norms of sanctioning that focus on whom one can and cannot punish. Additionally, it shows that people may punish according to whether they believe others are punishing.

The results are not immediately generalisable to all group-lending programmes.

Fieldwork in rural China is difficult to conduct. Although cultural and social patterns are known to be important in development work, little is known about how it affects microfinance.

This chapter examines the acts of burial and exhumation in three contemporary British history plays. For the purposes of this argument, a ‘history play’ may be defined as a piece of writing for the theatre that engages with historical events or settings. Such plays inevitably, at the moment of their staging or revival, take on particular meanings for audiences, since theatre as a live, durational art form encourages spectators to compare the historical events depicted with their present historical moment. The chapter argues that acts of burial and exhumation in contemporary British theatre are intimately tied to notions of land, soil and belonging. These became increasingly pertinent ideas in the UK’s political climate in the years following the 2016 Referendum on membership of the European Union. Of the three case studies, Victoria by David Greig (2000) dates from more than a decade before this vote, whilst Common by D. C. Moore (2017), and Eyam by Matt Hartley (2018) were written and staged in the interim between the Referendum result and the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. All three, however, feature corpses on stage as a means to consider time, temporality, place and history. Each play offers a different interpretation of what it means to play dead and to stay dead.

With this number the Library Review enters on its ninth year, and we send greetings to readers at home and abroad. Though the magazine was started just about the time when the depression struck the world, its success was immediate, and we are glad to say that its circulation has increased steadily every year. This is an eminently satisfactory claim to be able to make considering the times through which we have passed.