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The aim of this paper is to report on a study undertaken into disabled people's experience of the built environment when attempting to access and stay in employment.

Narratives were collected using semi‐structured interviews with 38 disabled people, all of whom had experience of paid and unpaid work.

Analysis of the interview narratives shows that disabled people experience a range of barriers and enablers in the built environment both to gaining employment and to staying in employment, and an accessible environment contributes to a successful employment experience.

This is a small exploratory study of disabled people's experience of the workplace built environment. Future research could focus in more detail on whether specific design features reduce the requirement for reasonable adjustments.

The implications are that disabled people are experiencing discrimination when working environments present barriers and reasonable adjustments, as required by the UK Disability Discrimination Act 1995, and 2005, are not made.

This is exploratory research and provides an insight into the experience of disabled people of the physical workplace environment, presenting examples of good and poor practice.

Before the appearance of our next issue, the Annual Meeting of the Library Association will have taken place. In many ways, as indicated last month, it will be an interesting meeting, largely because it is in the nature of an experiment. International conditions, the state of national and municipal finance, the absence of library workers with the colours, and the omission of social events, all tend to influence its character. It is possible, however, that these very circumstances may increase the interest in the actual conference business, especially as the programme bears largely upon the War. The programme itself is formidable, and it will be interesting to see how the section on the literature of the war, for example, will be treated. Probably the Publications' Committee have in mind the book symposia which are a feature of the meetings of various library associations in the United States. These consist of a few minutes' characterisation, by an opener, of a certain book or type of literature, and a discussion after it. The experiment was attempted in London last year at one of the monthly meetings, but owing to a misapprehension the speaker gave an excellent lecture on Francis Thompson of more than an hour's duration, when he had been expected to give a brief description of Francis Meynell's biography of that poet. If any gatherings for a similar purpose are arranged, we hope the speakers will be primed sufficiently to avoid that error. As for social events, their omission is less likely to be felt in London than anywhere else in the Kingdom. London is a perennial source of social amusement in itself, and the evenings can readily be filled there—“chacun à son goût”—really better than by attending pre‐arranged gatherings.

I take it for granted that the noble institution of Lifemanship is familiar to all librarians. So competitive a profession, where all must Gambit and Ploy to keep in the race, is natural soil for the doctrines of the new evangelism. In truth, the sagest among us were practising the creed before it had a local habitation or a name. But what may not be generally known is that a Sub‐Group of the parent institution has recently been formed to study the problems of our profession. In particular, the Group aims to encourage, advise and guide young recruits; to make the rough places smooth and shorten their pilgrimage to Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre— in other words, the Chief's Chair.

Owing to its almost universal quotation, the recent action of the Westminster City Council in closing not only its South Audley Street Library but all its newspaper rooms as well, has been the significant event of the last month. By these means, and by severe restriction of its expenditure on new books, a reduction of over three thousand pounds has been effected. Westminster is perhaps the richest borough in London; its library rate of only a fraction of a penny in the pound produces the sum of well‐nigh twelve thousand pounds. Certainly a larger amount than that recorded by any other library authority administering a similar number of libraries, although the fixed charges that have to be met are probably the highest in the Kingdom. Unaware of the extent of the Westminster income various local papers have quoted the amount saved and attempted to draw a moral from it to apply to the libraries in their own localities—libraries which are already in a state of semi‐starvation. It should, therefore, be remembered that, although the Westminster libraries have been crippled to an extent that only their users can know, there is still a larger sum devoted to public libraries in Westminster than in any other borough of similar size, and while Westminster is injured by the loss of one‐third of its income, a similar loss would mean ruin to most other library systems.

This paper (Part 2 of 2) aims to expand the previously developed performance assessment model (PAM) into a decision support system (DSS) to produce optimized decisions on rehabilitation of facilities.

The research includes a comprehensive PAM that integrates analytical hierarchy process-multi attribute utility theory methods for the physical, operational, and environmental aspects of the mosque, as described in Part 1 of the study. An optimized intervention tool is added to the PAM to complete the DSS development. The tool determines the optimum maintenance decisions that are in line with the budget and condition criticality. The deterioration measures are created using a deterministic straight-line extrapolation technique, and the intervention actions used in the optimization are specified through literature review and in-depth interviews with 11 experts. The optimization model was simplified into a user-friendly visual basic application and applied to an existing facility case study depicting its useful functionality.

The optimization model recommendation of interventions recovered the overall condition rating index (CRI) of the facility while maintaining budget constraints. The CRI in the first approach (minimum budget to achieve acceptable overall performance) was improved from 6.5 to 7.76, costing 275,850 SAR. While the second approach (Maximum recovery with a selected budget constraint, 300,000 SAR in this case) CRI was improved from 6.5 to 8.3, costing 299,850 SAR.

The presented DSS in this paper offers a tool that enables the rehabilitation and overall management of any facility by its managers. The DSS can also be further customized to fit the facility manager’s specific strategies and achieve desired objectives.

In a context where the promotion of a more sustainable agriculture is clearly aimed at, the paradoxical combination of sustainable agricultural practices (SAP) with chemical pesticides use instead of biological pest management techniques is recurrent in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries like Burkina Faso. Chemical pesticides are harmful to the environment and health. This paper aims to analyze the role of farmer education on the mode of adoption of SAP.

An endogenous treatment effect model is used with survey data on 1,898 rural households in Burkina Faso.

The results show a positive causal effect of farmer education on sustainable and chemical pesticide-free agriculture adoption.

Formal education appears to be general. This research could be extended to consider the role of training or extension services. More detailed results, focusing on spatial effects, could reinforce those of the present research.

Unlike previous studies, this paper addresses for the first time the paradoxical behavior of combining SAP with chemical pesticides use. It shows that farmer education contributes to explain it and is therefore a determining factor for a more sustainable agriculture.

An important facet of student’s sense of belonging is students’ relationships with, and time spent in, the university campus. The purpose of this paper is to explore the notion that access to campus “green space”, including parks, fields and gardens, may bolster students’ sense of belonging, improve well-being feelings and promote place attachment.

The authors surveyed students in different locations (including three green and one non-green campus spaces) across a large UK campus-based Northern institution. 146 students participated in the study in one of the four campus locations. The authors investigated how being in green spaces on campus may impact students’ sense of belonging, well-being and place attachment. The authors also qualitatively explored students’ perceptions of campus spaces through Ahn’s (2017) 10 Words Question measure.

Analyses demonstrate that students surveyed in green spaces reported significantly more positive sense of belonging, compared to students surveyed in non-green campus spaces. Campus location did not impact well-being, however. Students associated green spaces on campus with “calm”, “positive emotion” and “nature” words and non-green spaces with “busy”, “social” and “students”.

Taken together, the results of this paper suggest that access to green spaces can be important for campus sense of belonging. Thus, efforts should be made to ensure the sustainability of these important spaces across university campuses.

This study crucially examines how occupying green spaces on university campuses may impact students’ feelings of belongingness. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that uses field-based methods to understand students’ feelings whilst occupying green spaces.