Agile Project Management in Libraries: Creating Collaborative,Resilient, Responsive Organizations

Libraries must continually adapt to meet the ever-changing needs of users. Doing so requires the ability to be flexible and respond quickly. This is a case study of how The George Washington University Libraries rethought its approach to collection development using a cross-functional, team-based strategy that leveraged the benefits of Agile project management. Adopting an Agile approach to collection development maximized the impact of the library’s financial resources and enabled staff to develop new skills. This project underscores the value of collaboration, agility, and experimentation in libraries.     

When practice takes precedence: conceptions of inquiry and the link to ethical posture

Using participatory action research (PAR), this paper explores the ethical practice of students engaged in practitioner research in a higher education context. Using narrative enquiry, the paper explores the participants’ experiences of practitioner research, including ethical dilemmas that resulted from a conflict of values between the practitioner and research roles. We postulate a multi-dimensional approach to ethical practice known as ‘ethical posture’ emerging from our consideration of conceptions of inquiry that resulted in contrasting ethical behaviour.     

Discourses of the good parent in attributing school success

Recent education policy places a heavy emphasis on parents in relation to students' success at school. This paper explores how parents and teachers account for school success. Using membership categorisation analysis, it interrogates data collected in different interview situations across sites over a period of 20 years. The analysis shows how parents and teachers use talk as moral work to conversationally constitute particular agreed versions of the category ‘parent’. This category is interactively assembled through the use of category-bound attributes that construct deficit discourses of parents that explain student achievement. The analysis demonstrates that parents are complicit with teachers in producing versions of being a good parent wherein they are held responsible for their children's school success and that minimises the responsibility of the school. These findings raise questions both about who is responsible for schooling and about current contradictory policy emphases on parent and teacher responsibility for school success.     

Understanding heterogeneity in pathways between interparental conflict and children's involvement: The moderating role of affect-biased attention

The study examined the moderating role of children's affect-biased attention to angry, fearful, and sad adult faces in the link between interparental conflict and children's distinct forms of involvement. Participants included 243 preschool children (M_age = 4.60 years, 56% female) and their parents from racially (48% African American, 43% White) and socioeconomically (median annual household income = $36,000) diverse backgrounds. Data collection took place in the Northeastern United States (2010–2014). Utilizing a multi-method, multi-informant, longitudinal design, attention away from anger selectively amplified the link between interparental conflict and children's subsequent coercive involvement (β = −.15). Greater attention to fear potentiated the pathway between interparental conflict and children's later cautious (β = .14) and caregiving involvement (β = .15). Findings are interpreted in the context of environmental sensitivity models.     

Books for the hospital emergency service

This is a list of books that should be available in either the hospital emergency room or the medical library. The forty-nine books listed are divided into the following categories: General, Surgery and Trauma, Burns, Cardiology, Dentistry, Disaster Medicine, First Aid, Geriatrics, Obstetrics, Pediatrics, Psychiatry, Toxicology, and Transportation. An asterisk has been placed before twelve books that are particularly recommended for the hospital emergency room as well as the medical library. The latest edition is given for each book, and, unless otherwise noted, each has been annotated by one of the authors.