COUNSELLING AND TOLERANCE

The author of this essay is the Minister for Education and Human Resources of Malta. It serves as a welcoming speech for the participants in the conference. The significance of 1995 as the International Year for Tolerance is outlined. The need for tolerance in all societies is explained as is the need for education for tolerance in schools.     

天堂波多黎各

Standing on the white sands of Red Beach,it's hardto believe that US Navy bombers ever droned overthe surf on their way to drop explosives nearby.The beach,a semicircle(半圆形) of stark cliffs andswaying palms surrounding a sparkling azure sea,is asperfect a picture of paradise as the wallpaper in a 1970srumpus(喧闹) room。Silence is broken only by the     

Library systems in the electronic era

The ‘traditional’ academic library system model – i.e. a central system constructed around a common catalogue record that also dictated the end‐users' view – is breaking down. Systems that were constructed to handle the processing and lending of printed items are no longer capable, on their own, of dealing with the variety of different information resources handled by modern academic libraries. A great deal has been written about how end‐users expect more ‘Web 2.0’ features than library catalogues currently provide. New front‐end services have been designed by libraries and library system providers to cater for this need. However, not much has been written about the needs of internal library staff who struggle with processing, handling, and supporting the huge volume of electronic resources subscribed to by libraries. Electronic resource management systems have been developed to cater for these needs, and new standards for data interchange with such systems have been developed. Just as standards were important in encouraging electronic data interchange (orders, invoices, claims, etc.) between libraries, publishers, and agents in the last century, so new standards are evolving for such transactions in the electronic era.     

Book Review

Peer Review: The Challenges for the Humanities and Social Sciences A British Academy Report British Academy, 2007, 61 pp. Freely available online at http://www.britac.ac.uk/reports/peer‐review/index.html ; print copies available on request from Ms Vivienne Hurley, The British Academy, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1P 5AH, UK; tel. +44 (0)20 7969 5268; email v.hurley@britac.ac.uk