PUBLIC AND ELITE ATTITUDES TO ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES

This paper puts the environment into perspective. Politiciansand commentators see the environment as yesterday's issue, forgettingthat the core of environmental activists is still double thelevel of just five years ago. International comparisons stretchingfrom Poland to New Zealand are made, examining the public'senvironmental behavior, attitudes and values. Using Great Britainas a case study, detailed comparisons are made between the attitudesof the general public with journalists, the financial community,captains of industry, and Members of Parliament and the latterthen compared with Members of the European Parliament. The publicis demanding action by companies and by governments on environmentalissues and has little faith in either to take corrective action.     

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     

Communicating Knowing Through Communities of Practice: Exploring Internal Communicative Processes and Differences Among CoPs

Knowing is an enacted, communicated process that is difficult to observe, let alone manage, in organizations. Communities of practice (CoPs) offer a productive solution for improving knowledge and knowledge management, but the communicative processes that enact CoPs have not been explored, leaving CoPs as an organizational black box. This research extends CoP theory as a means to determine the presence of a CoP and distinguish between various CoPs, and as a practical means to evaluate the communicative processes of organizational knowledge. CoPs enact the communicative nature of knowing through the elements of mutual engagement, negotiation of a joint enterprise, and shared repertoire. Specifically, two groups of volunteers are examined through a combination of participation, observation, and interviews in order to explore CoP theory as a dynamic system for examining and evaluating organizational knowledge.