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The purpose of this paper is to propose a simple heuristic model that provides diagnostic capabilities and prevention insights.

The paper brings together findings from previous research including injury statistics from several industries to illustrate that the model's predicted results can be found in practice. This is a conceptual paper that applies a simple heuristic model to existing data. The model leads to an equation with four parameters: a rate of improvement reflecting prevention, a rate of deterioration reflecting obsolescence and lapsing of procedures and practices, an intrinsic limit reflecting technological capability, and a “viscosity” that adds the impact of management system malfunction to the technological limits and normal delays.

The model says that, on the average, injury rates decrease with time if the rate of rejection is greater than the rate of mortality. If “r”<“m” injury rates increase exponentially with time, and drastic results can follow. When “r”=”m” the model produces a constant rate of failure that will continue until something is done to increase “r” or decrease “m”. A constant rate of failure means that an apparent safety limit has been reached. Unless this corresponds to the technological limit, a constant rate means that some preventable failures are recurring with regularity: they risk being accepted as “hazards of the job”. Stable periods may be normal, but they can lead to complacency.

The heuristic power of the model is evident in that parameters and insights from applying it can help define prevention activities to reduce the rate of injury and, by implication, to lengthen operational periods between consecutive injuries.

The drum model can help managers understand the separate but related effects of technology and management on injury rates. The model can be used to seek prevention possibilities hidden in the aggregate data, and it can help the manager to use period data to identify areas or groups in need of help.

In this chapter, we propose a blended methodological approach (critical) educational ethnography, to address problems of education. The chapter includes a brief overview of critical and educational ethnography, which inform the methodology, followed by a discussion of the essential elements and pedagogical objectives that undergird and operationalize the methodology. The essential elements include articulating a critical context, defining and understanding culture, establishing relationships and embeddedness, and multiple ways of knowing. Rather than articulate a curriculum and content for teaching (critical) educational ethnography, pedagogical objectives are provided to support the development of novice researchers (i.e., doctoral students, researchers-in-training).

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

Describes a unique experiment in safety management which has led to a significant improvement in the safety performance of work groups at the smelter of INCO Ltd in Sudbury, Canada.

OUR ISSUES DO NOT PROVE ANYTHING? “READING is finished” is the portentious quotation from Richard Hoggart's address to the School Libraries Association which we find in small type at the foot of a column of the American L.A. Bulletin. A year or two ago, with apprehension and gravity, an American writer asserted that one of the darker signs of life in the U.S.A. was that a generation had arrived that had lost not only the art but the willing power to read, or perhaps never had them to lose. The first American report we have opened this year is The Brooklyn Public Library Salutes its Readers, its 61st annual one. Mr. Francis R. St. John, the chief librarian, says in his first paragraph “this has been a record year” and continues, “This year readers were responsible for the greatest circulation in our history”. Yes, 9½ millions of it. The question occurs: if no one reads and books are finished, how can these statements and figures be reconciled?

THE credulity of enthusiasm was never better exemplified than in the case of John Dee. Here we have a man almost typical of Elizabethan England: necromancer, seer, alchemist, mathematician, and lastly, instead of firstly, natural philosopher. It was the age of portents, of abnormalities made normal, of magicians, of the powers of good and evil, of the striving after the unknown whilst the knowable was persistently overlooked. Swift sums up these philosophers in “Gulliver's Travels,” and two centuries earlier Erasmus in his “Praise of Folly” notes them. “Next come the philosophers,” he writes, “who esteem themselves the only favourites of wisdom; they build castles in the air, and infinite worlds in a vacuum. They'll give you to a hair's breadth the dimensions of the sun, when indeed they are unable to construe the mechanism of their own body: yet they spy out ideas, universals, separate forms, first matters, quiddities, formalities, and keep correspondence with the stars.” Such was John Dee, a compound of boundless enthusiasm and boundless credulity. There is nothing abnormal about him, for he is to be judged by the age in which he lived. His belief in witchcraft and intercourse with spirits was shared by all the men of his time save the abnormal Reginald Scott, whose famous “Discovery of Witchcraft” produced James the First's impassioned reply.

In response to increased demands from members for short courses on all aspects of information work, a greatly extended programme of courses, totalling something approaching 130 days, is being planned for 1968. Apart from providing established courses more frequently a number of new ones will be offered: details of those planned for the first quarter of the year will be found in the list on page 398 and it is hoped to include courses on the general problems of introducing mechanization into library and information systems and on more detailed aspects of mechanization such as systems analysis. Courses on the handling and exploitation of special materials will include one on maps, an advanced course on patents and an advanced course on business information. A number of courses are being planned jointly with Aslib Groups and with other bodies, and advance details of these will appear in subsequent issues.

Describes an integrated model of error management which includes: the external environment; the corporate environment; the manager and the managed; incident management; inquiries; and, learning from errors. Includes classification of error types with examples. By understanding this model organizations can improve their ability to manage error.

This paper seeks to propose a simple four‐element model for how organisations should manage their public relations when they are faced with a critical incident.

The article brings together findings from previous research to construct a four‐element model. Five short case studies are then used to illustrate how the four elements contribute to the management of a critical incident.

Organisations need to follow four elements for their public relations when they are facing a critical incident. These four elements are: think of the public and the media; act fast; be straight; and, show concern and compassion.

Those organisations that used the four elements of the public relations process appear to have gained not only from the short‐term benefits of managing the incidents but also from a long‐term effect on their corporate reputations.

This paper is of value to senior managers and public relations professionals in that it provides a simple four‐element model for positively managing public relations in a critical incident.