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In this commentary, we will examine London and Sessa's (this volume) article on continuous learning in organizations from alternative researcher and practitioner perspectives. Specifically, we review its major points, examine the issues of entity selection and definitions, discuss the need for a “parts and wholes” approach, contrast alternative process models that stress the importance of time, and speculate about different user perspectives and their approaches. On balance, their article will stimulate much needed discussion and research in an important area.

Ensuring that a child has a good start in life requires a partnership that extends beyond that of the parents and that precedes a child's conception. Sharing this vision among agencies that have contact with marginalised young people led to the use of an infant simulator to attract ‘at risk’ young people into a program that helps ensure that the choice to conceive is not only informed but also has the potential to promote mental health. Participants demonstrated that they increased their knowledge of the health and other implications of having a baby and some took active measures to improve their health.

EVERY librarian in his inmost heart dislikes newspapers. He regards them as bad literature; attractors of undesirable readers; a drain upon the limited resources of the library; and a target against which the detractors of public libraries are constantly battering. From the standpoint of the librarian, newspapers are the most expensive and least productive articles stocked by a library, and their lavish provision is, perhaps, the most costly method of purchasing waste‐paper ever devised. Pressure of circumstances and local conditions combine, however, to muzzle the average librarian, and the consequence is that a perfectly honest and outspoken discussion of the newspaper question is very rarely seen. In these circumstances, an attempt to marshal the arguments for and against the newspaper, together with some account of a successful practical experiment at limitation, may prove interesting to readers of this magazine.

WE begin a new year, in which we wish good things for all who work in libraries and care for them, in circumstances which are not unpropitious. At times raven voices prophesy the doom of a profession glued to things so transitory as books are now imagined to be, by some. Indeed, so much is this a dominant fear that some librarians, to judge by their utterances, rest their hopes upon other recorded forms of knowledge‐transmission; forms which are not necessarily inimical to books but which they think in the increasing hurry of contemporary life may supersede them. These fears have not been harmful in any radical way so far, because they may have increased the librarian's interest in the ways of bringing books to people and people to books by any means which successful business firms use (for example) to advertise what they have to sell. The modern librarian becomes more and more the man of business; some feel he becomes less and less the scholar; but we suggest that this is theory with small basis in fact. Scholars are not necessarily, indeed they can rarely be, bookish recluses; nor need business men be uncultured. For men of plain commonsense there need be few ways of life that are so confined that they exclude their followers from other ways and other men's ideas and activities. And, as for the transitoriness of books and the decline of reading, we ourselves decline to acknowledge or believe in either process. Books do disappear, as individuals. It is well that they do for the primary purpose of any book is to serve this generation in which it is published; and, if there survive books that we, the posterity of our fathers, would not willingly let die, it is because the life they had when they were contemporary books is still in them. Nothing else can preserve a book as a readable influence. If this were not so every library would grow beyond the capacity of the individual or even towns to support; there would, in the world of readers, be no room for new writers and their books, and the tragedy that suggests is fantastically unimaginable. A careful study, recently made of scores of library reports for 1951–52, which it is part of our editorial duty to make, has produced the following deductions. Nearly every public library, and indeed other library, reports quite substantial increases in the use made of it; relatively few have yet installed the collections of records as alternatives to books of which so much is written; further still, where “readers” and other aids to the reading of records, films, etc., have been installed, the use of them is most modest; few librarians have a book‐fund that is adequate to present demands; fewer have staffs adequate to the demands made upon them for guidance by the advanced type of readers or for doing thoroughly the most ordinary form of book‐explanation. It is, in one sense a little depressing, but there is the challenging fact that these islands contain a greater reading population than they ever had. One has to reflect that of our fifty millions every one, including infants who have not cut their teeth, the inhabitants of asylums, the illiterate—and, alas, there are still thousands of these—and the drifters and those whose vain boast is that “they never have time to read a book”—every one of them reads six volumes a year. A further reflection is that public libraries may be the largest distributors, but there are many others and in the average town there may be a half‐dozen commercial, institutional and shop‐libraries, all distributing, for every public library. This fact is stressed by our public library spending on books last year at some two million pounds, a large sum, but only one‐tenth of the money the country spent on books. There are literally millions of book‐readers who may or may not use the public library, some of them who do not use any library but buy what they read. The real figure of the total reading of our people would probably be astronomical or, at anyrate, astonishing.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

EVERY now and again, one of the solemn monthly or quarterly magazines, by way of enlivening its pages, inserts a terrific onslaught on municipal libraries, in which the judgment of heaven is called down upon the fiction reader, and the library authorities are condemned as a set of ignorant and inefficient office‐holders, who pander to a depraved public taste. The last assailant of this sort whom we had the pleasure of setting right was Mr. J. Churton Collins, who used the Nineteenth Century and After, as the medium for conveying his accusations. Now comes Mr. W. H. Harwood, who fills six‐and‐a‐half pages of the Westminster Review for February, 1906, with a quantum of twaddle about libraries, which differs from most recent articles of the same sort only in its dulness. In his use of this journalistic cliché, Mr. Harwood displays the customary ignorance of the Public Libraries Acts, by styling his paper “Free Libraries and Fiction,” and by his failure to prove even one of his statements by reference to a single concrete fact. Briefly, Mr. Harwood's position is this:—

Economic growth is one the most relevant economic objectives for policy makers. In order to determine the variables that enhance such an objective it is important to consider different types of entrepreneurial activity. It is also necessary to consider the level of development and growth of a country to design the proper economic policy measures, given that entrepreneurship motivations and circumstances vary from country to country. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to analyse the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic growth, including the role played by institutions and innovation considering two types of entrepreneurship (necessity and opportunity) and countries.

Data analysis of 31 countries with varying levels of growth and development yielded two large groups – either innovation-driven economies or efficiency-driven economies – following GEM classification based on the phases set out by the World Economic Forum. In order to test the hypotheses, a partial least squares analysis is carried out to show the existing relationships between the different variables, specifically: innovation, institutions, entrepreneurship and economic growth.

The empirical analysis used demonstrates that innovation positively affects economic growth and entrepreneurship. In addition, adequate functioning of institutions is shown to enhance economic growth and opportunity entrepreneurship. Finally, there is a positive relationship between entrepreneurship and economic growth.

Unlike other studies, different types of entrepreneurship (by necessity and opportunity) are essential to this analysis of the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic growth. The country sample was divided considering some country-specific structural circumstances. Neither aspect is considered in the literature and should be considered relevant for designing measures to enhance economic activity.

To provide a list of non‐fictional books, as published, for the use of Librarians and Book‐buyers generally, arranged so as to serve as a continuous catalogue of new books; an aid to exact classification and annotation ; and a select list of new books proposed to be purchased. Novels, school books, ordinary reprints and strictly official publications will not be included in the meantime.

Global Skills for College Completion (GSCC) offers transformative use of social media – a Guided Digital Environment – a unique set of online tools and processes to capture, consolidate, and advance the effective faculty classroom work. The ambition of GSCC is to achieve a quantum increase in the historically low pass rates of basic skills students in American community colleges. The goal is to produce a rate increase so dramatic, consistently 80%, that it is “visible to the naked eye.” This increased success rate in basic skills would have the effect of accelerating remediation and increasing the probability of college completion. We believe community college basic skills faculty possess all the wisdom necessary to figure out how to improve these rates, given the right tools. In this chapter we describe the GSCC project, the Guided Digital Environment and the Tools and Routines provided to faculty to allow them to be research-practitioners in the project, and the research we drew on to build it. We include early information and observations on the essential design elements for identifying effective basic skills pedagogy. We also describe the innovative technological tools used to create an engaged community and leave a digital trail for analysis. GSCC is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through a grant to the League for Innovation as part of its goal to double the number of young adults in the United States with a postsecondary credential by 2020.