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IN THE DAYS BEFORE TYPEWRITERS, stenographers, and tape‐recorders, when every word of a book was written by hand, revised by hand, and eventually printed from the handwritten manuscript, the industry required to produce such a history as that of Gibbon is remarkable. How much more remarkable the industry of women writers, in days when authorship for women was not always regarded as a respectable profession. Consider the output of Jane Austen, compelled to write in a corner of the family sitting‐room, and to conceal her papers hastily if a caller arrived, or Mrs Trollope, nursing her dying son by day, and writing all night to support her family.

The growing acceptance of evidence‐based decision support systems in healthcare organizations has resulted in recognition of data quality improvement as a key area of both strategic and operational management. Information managers are faced with their emerging role in establishing quality management standards for information collection and application in the day‐to‐day delivery of health care. In the USA, rigid data‐based practice and performance standards and regulations related to information management have met with some resistance from providers. In the emerging information‐intensive healthcare environment, managers are beginning to understand the importance of formal, continuous data quality assessment in health services delivery and quality management. Variation in data quality management practice poses quality problems in such an environment, since it precludes comparative assessments across larger markets or areas, a critical component of evidence‐based quality assessments. In this study a national survey of health information managers was employed to provide a benchmark of the degree of such variation, examining how quality management practices vary across area indicators. Findings here suggest that managers continue to employ paper‐based quality assessment audits, despite nationwide mandates to adopt system‐based measures using aggregate data analysis and automated quality intervention. The level of adoption of automated quality management methods in this study varied significantly across practice characteristics and areas, suggesting the existence of data quality barriers to cross‐market comparative assessment. Implications for healthcare service delivery in an evidence‐based environment are further examined and discussed.

The following is a brief outline of what seem to us the main points of the Act:—

The traditional public library met the needs of its patrons by circulating books, holding story hours, and providing readers' advisory and reference services. Today, public libraries circulate art work and garden tools, provide disco dancing and college courses, and (in New York State) help their users find jobs through library‐based Job Information Centers.

This chapter explores the role of postmodern intertextuality in Neil Jordan’s 2012 vampire film Byzantium. This intertextuality serves to place the film in dialogue with earlier vampire fiction, in particular the 1970s cycle of British and European erotic vampire films such as Daughters of Darkness and The Vampire Lovers from Hammer Films. Byzantium recalls these earlier texts structurally and thematically, both through direct reference and more oblique allusions.

While Fredric Jameson characterizes postmodern intertextuality as mere nostalgia and the imitation of ‘dead styles’, feminist postmodern theorists such as Linda Hutcheon contend argue for the political potential of postmodernism. This chapter proposes that the postmodern intertextuality of Byzantium is a critical intertextuality, and that the foregrounding of storytelling, writing, and rewriting in the film draws attention to the ways in which the intertextuality of Byzantium is not merely a return to past forms but also a reworking of them.

Taking up the work of Linda Hutcheon and Catherine Constable, this chapter demonstrates the ways in which Byzantium critically reworks aspects of earlier vampire fiction in order to critique and expand the representation of the female vampire and through this explore issues relating to female subjectivity and community.