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Recently a water pipe burst in the ceiling above the technical services area of Memorial Library, Mankato State University. When our staff arrived for work, they found carts of books, audiovisual materials, and computer software soaked with dirty water which continued to drip from ceiling tiles onto work areas, desks, and new materials.

Whether readers of this work are students or professionals, they will find the book informative. For the student, Saffady takes care to define all terms and acronyms. Successive sections of each chapter build on the previous ones, so that on completing the book, the student has learned a great deal about optical disks. For the professional, the strength of the book is the organization and review of the optical disk “landscape” it provides.

Internet resources are increasing in number and importance. This paper reports on the practices and policies adopted for organising access to free Internet resources in a number of large university libraries and national libraries. References are given to some general printed literature on the topic as well as to websites exemplifying particular approaches. The paper is intended to give an impression of how libraries are integrating free Internet resources into their descriptions of information which their users can access, which resources should be included, and how they should be treated. It concentrates on the integration of free Internet resources, although the division of electronic resources into “free” and “paid for” is not usually made at the institutions studied.

The article describes work done at the library of CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, to improve access to electronic journals for the scientists, engineers and technicians who are their users. The library catalogues electronic journals, separating the record for the electronic version from that for any printed version. Users can then access electronic journals through the Web OPAC, or through two browsable lists of titles. GO DIRECT allows users to go straight to an article, a script calculating what the article's URL should be from the reference entered by the user. The library is keen to promote the use of electronic journals, and is undertaking user studies based on logs and an online questionnaire.

This article considers what contribution traditional library practices — identification, selection, organisation and retrieval — can make to managing networked information, and how those practices need to be updated to take account of the special difficulties of the Internet. The answer is found in cooperation. Cooperation between librarians and authors in the creation of metadata. International cooperation between librarians to select resources. The article defines a workflow for cooperation in both fields, and proposes a library search engine to hold jointly created records and a catalogue of Websites online to support selection.

This paper aims to explore the traditional and emerging roles of cataloguing professionals in a global network information environment. That exploration becomes even more critical in view of migration of information resources into digital, electronic and virtual domains.

An exploratory research design was adopted. The method was to first examine current issues in library and information practice with specific focus on digital technology, the electronic environment, automation, networking, the internet, cyberspace and virtual libraries. The next approach was to examine the challenges of operating in a globalized information environment.

Cataloguers have key roles in knowledge segmentation, identification, organization and authentication. They are vital as content and system managers, software specialists and information retrieval system designers. In all, more than 23 roles are articulated for forward‐looking cataloguing professionals.

The paper's originality lies in its argument that roles are correlates of competencies and that as the practice of knowledge organization migrates to a dominantly global information network environment, cataloguers must upgrade their competencies in order to effectively operate in the emerging environment.

On April 2, 1987, IBM unveiled a series of long‐awaited new hardware and software products. The new computer line, dubbed the Personal Systems 30, 50, 60, and 80, seems destined to replace the XT and AT models that are the mainstay of the firm's current personal computer offerings. The numerous changes in hardware and software, while representing improvements on previous IBM technology, will require users purchasing additional computers to make difficult choices as to which of the two IBM architectures to adopt.

Nancy Maclean’s Democracy in Chains (2017) is an attempt to provide a narrative arc for the rise of free market ideas in political action during the second half of the twentieth century and into the first decades of the twenty-first century. The central character in her narrative is neither F.A. Hayek nor Milton Friedman, let alone Adam Smith or Ludwig von Mises, but James M. Buchanan, the 1986 Nobel Prize winner in economics. MacLean argues that rather than extol the virtues of the market economy as Hayek and Friedman did before him, Buchanan focused on the dysfunctions of politics. Due to a series of argumentative fallacies and failures that follow from her ideological blinders, I argue that MacLean’s attempt is a missed opportunity to seriously engage some very pressing issues in public choice and political economy and understand how James Buchanan attempted to resolve them in a democratic manner. As such, Democracy in Chains is not only a mischaracterization of Buchanan and his project but also a poignant lesson to us all about how ideological blinders can subvert even the sincerest effort to unearth truth in the social sciences and the humanities.

This chapter discusses how Nancy Fraser’s theory of two-dimensional participatory justice may be employed in research concerned with inequalities within higher education. The main concepts of Fraser’s theory are discussed and evaluated in the light of the critical attention they have attracted. Following that, I demonstrate the empirical application of Fraser’s ideas through discussion of extracts of data from a recent small-scale investigation undertaken within a UK-based higher education institution. Finally, I conclude by discussing the strengths of Fraser’s concepts with some indications for future research.

The chapter examines the perspectives of campus advocates involved with the advancement of a comprehensive internationalization process at their state comprehensive university (SCU). Advocates explain their definitions of comprehensive internationalization, which are analyzed through an internationalization lens and framework of intercultural competence based on recent studies of Internationalization at Home (IaH). The study found faculty and staff perspectives of comprehensive internationalization to reflect attributes consistent with IaH, which is believed to be a vehicle for transmitting intercultural competence throughout the higher education institution. The context for this study is important as it takes place in an SCU located in a region where higher education is under significant public scrutiny.