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Helen Bird and colleagues report on a small‐scale research project completed in west Yorkshire that examined the effects of the closure of a traditional sheltered workshop on those who attended. The closure was contentious, and the report questions the centrality accorded to ‘social exclusion’ as a central feature of current policy and practice. They argue for a more nuanced approach, which reflects both service users' actual preferences and current social realities.

Edith Margaret Robertson Ditmas — ‘E.D.’ to her staff and many colleagues, ‘Edith’ to her family and friends — was appointed General Secretary of Aslib in May 1933 in succession to Mr S. S. Bullock, and was redesignated Director in 1946. She retired from that post on 28 February 1950, being succeeded by Leslie Wilson. In June 1947 she took over the editorship of the Journal of Documentation with effect from the beginning of volume three, following the appointment of the founder editor, Theodore Besterman, as Counsellor, Bibliographical and Library Centre, Unesco. She continued this work until 1962. A note by Geoffrey Woledge in the June 1962 issue of the Journal informed readers that Miss Ditmas was being succeeded as Managing Editor by Miss Barbara Kyle ‘who has contributed to the Journal in the past and is now taking up a full‐time post on the Aslib staff’. It reminded readers that Aslib's establishment of the Editorial Board in 1947 had only been intended as a temporary measure (its membership in 1947 comprised F. C. Francis, D.J. Urquhart and G. Woledge) and with reference to Miss Ditmas continued:

This chapter explores the role that birdwatching plays in The Archers. It demonstrates some significant similarities between the way that birdwatching is portrayed in present-day Ambridge, and the way it was presented in both fictional and non-fictional literature of the 1940s. These similarities suggest that birdwatching in Ambridge is an activity that tends to perpetuate traditional class and gender divisions. Particularly in terms of gender, this is a surprising discovery, given the many strong female characters in the show, and suggests that cultural assumptions about gender and birdwatching run deep in UK society today. The chapter warns that a failure to recognise these assumptions not only hampers the progress of women who aspire to be taken seriously as ornithologists, but also risks reinforcing dualistic thinking about humans and nature at a time when the environmental crisis makes it more important than ever to recognise the ecological interconnectedness of human and nonhuman worlds. However, the recent development of Kirsty Miller’s storyline, in which she is rediscovering her earlier love of the natural world, not only offers hope of a shift away from this traditional bias but also opens a space for a more nuanced examination of the importance of birds in human–nature relations.