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Expanding on Harris and Sinclair (2014, p. 5) claim that “the writing of a play is an act of inquiry”, this paper aims to consider the joyful entanglements, messiness and friction-led use of creative methods within the context of a PhD in education studies.

Amplifying the voices of both doctoral student and supervisor, the authors explain how the construction of a dramatic script informed the crafting of an alternative format thesis within which “the play’s the thing” (Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2). In responding to the influence of creativity in the lives of both the student and the supervisor, the paper uses creative and reflective writing as a method of inquiry to explore how practice and procedure are navigated in relation to non-standard theses submissions.

The authors find that academic expectancy continues to influence the structure, form and presentation of the PhD thesis and argue that enduring tensions surrounding the reverence of “tradition” impact the application and nature of creativity.

The piece aims to examine the multiple challenges faced but, importantly, highlights how the creative partnership between supervisor and student has forged changes in contemporary doctoral education in the awarding institution and the implications for future practice within doctoral education more broadly.

This brief narrative seeks to capture the 12-year relationship between the author and V. LeRoy Nash, who at 94 has been the oldest death row prisoner in the United States since 1996. LeRoy's life includes many killings, and over 71 years in prison, before Johnson and Nash developed this unique father–son love relationship.

Surveys of corporate real estate executives in North America and elsewhere in the world indicate significant shifts in their thinking in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Aside from the predictably much greater concern with planning for emergency escape from buildings, executives indicated that the greatest shifts in their thinking centred around issues of security of information technology and communication systems; greater use of teleconferencing and video‐conferencing (reducing travel); and more new ways of working such as homeworking, satellite and neighbourhood work centres, and hotelling. Along with such changes in practice, executives also indicated the desire to create stronger communities within their organisations, even as they also expect further to disperse their activities across locations. There is a slight shift in preference away from downtown locations and a much higher overall concern with occupancy control over the spaces that they occupy. In North America especially, there is a shift away from occupancy of high‐profile named buildings. Overall the surveys indicate that corporate real estate executives are moving ahead with distributed work‐location strategies, increasing their reliance on virtual technologies for collaboration, and re‐thinking the branding of their physical assets and the nature of community in their organisations. All of these changes further indicate the increasingly integrative role of corporate real estate within wider business strategy and a closer alignment of corporate real estate activities with human resources, organisational development and information technology.

Describes a networked virtual environment, a type of virtual reality most commonly known as a “MUD” or a “MOO”, which was used at an internationally‐attended scientific conference held on the Internet. Interviews with conference attendees indicated enthusiasm for the effectiveness of the medium, and revealed how the virtual environment can be modified to improve conferencing efficacy. Such alterations included: novel input‐output control management; automation of conference registration; control of anonymous or guest connections; simplification of conference center topography; an improved methodology for recording discussion sessions; use of moderated rooms to compensate for network lag; and providing buffers to update late arriving participants. Concludes that networked virtual environments provide an inexpensive means for effective international conferencing on the Internet.

The following is an annotated list of materials dealing with orientation to library facilities and services, instruction in the use of information resources, and research and computer skills that are related to retrieving and using information. This is the fourteenth review to be published in Reference Services Review and lists items in English published in 1987. A few items are not annotated because the compiler could not obtain copies of them for this review.

Raison d'Etre is a hypermedia design history application. It provides access to a database of video clips containing stories and personal perspectives of design team members recorded at various times during the course of a project. The system is intended to provide a simple frame‐work for recording and organizing the informal history and rationale that design teams create and share in the course of their collaboration. This article describes 1) the scenarios of use the authors are trying to support, 2) the methods they used collecting and organizing the database, and 3) the status of their prototype.