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A corporate organisation, because it exists in a climate characterised by uncertainty, ambiguity and a need for accurate communication, tends to choose a new organisation member on his/her perceived similarity to group social norms. One of the most important of these is language. Since membership results in greater allocation of scarce resources (social acceptance, money and power), self‐interests push the new member to accommodate more closely the group's speech norms. Choice of new members on the basis of language has serious implications for the question of discrimination towards minority groups who typically have their own group‐specific speech norms which may not correspond to management norms.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the suggestion that students from disadvantaged backgrounds become segregated from the wider university environment, cutting off their ability of engagement and having a voice within this arena. The limitations of university Student Unions is discussed, in terms of how they are disengaged themselves with understanding and relating to these independently run cultural groups.

The study has been carried out by a series of interviews within three university Afro‐Caribbean Societies (ACS's). The purpose of this is to create an internal view of the experiences of these groups and examine how being cut off from the wider university experience adds to their losses in equal student participation and engagement.

Although these societies embrace positive images within their cultures, the findings of this study suggests ways these societies can begin to integrate with their wider university societies and encourage engagement, in order to give their voices a platform in both academic and social arenas.

The study becomes an original contribution to existing literature by taking into account cultural groups which have not been acknowledged as already being segregated from the university experience.

Libraries must actively support humanities text files, but we must remember that to focus exclusively on texts tied to specific systems is to put ourselves in opposition to the needs of the researchers we intend to serve. A working model of the sort of system and resource provision that is appropriate is described. The system, one put in place at the University of Michigan, is the result of several years of discussions and investigation. While by no means the only model upon which to base such a service, it incorporates several features that are essential to the support of these materials: standardized, generalized data; the reliance on standards for the delivery of information; and remote use. Sidebars discuss ARTFL, a textual database; the Oxford Text Archive; InteLex; the Open Text Corporation; the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI); the machine‐readable version of the Oxford English Dictionary, 2d edition; and the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities.