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Health research in the UK is being impeded by a stretched NHS system. The purpose of this paper is to use the Great Fire of Rome as an allegory to understand the difficulties encountered by health researchers when attempting to conduct research within a healthcare system that is currently in crisis.

The paper draws on both the authors’ own and other research teams’ experiences from the published literature in order to demonstrate that this difficulty is a widespread problem for the health research community in the UK.

Recruitment and engagement issues across different research studies and clinical environments are often ascribed as being related to individual contexts or settings. Rather, the authors propose that these problems are actually writ large across nearly the entire NHS. The authors offer ideas for what can be done to alleviate the worst of this situation – a change in culture and ways of working alongside employing more pragmatic, rapid methods to engage exceptionally busy healthcare staff.

The paper offers a provocative viewpoint that instead of seeking to individualise recruitment and engagement issues in relation to the local context, the research community should publicly acknowledge the universality of this problem in order to bring about meaningful change.

This chapter provides a brief overview of community sanctions in Australia and examines the extent to which McNeill’s analysis in Pervasive Punishment (2019) is applicable in the Australian context. Two key issues in the Australian context are, firstly, state and territory-level variations within a federal political structure, and secondly, disproportionate Indigenous imprisonment and community sanction rates and the generally destructive impact of the criminal legal system on Indigenous communities and peoples. The chapter argues that developing a better agonistic politics around community sanctions requires descending from the broad level of historical and sociological analysis to examine state and territory-level variations in judicial and correctional structures, histories and cultures. Further, that Australian community sanctions cannot be understood without a primary focus on the differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous rates, experiences and meaning. The key to addressing the destructive impact of criminal legal processes and practices on Indigenous peoples lies in developing Indigenous governance, empowerment, self-determination, sovereignty and nation-building. Two recent developments promoting Indigenous governance are examined: the Uluru Statement from the Heart and Justice Reinvestment projects initiated by First Nations communities, highlighting the importance of activism, contest and struggle by community organisations.

The management of autonomous, heterogeneous network resources and services provides new challenges which libraries are now addressing. This paper outlines an approach based on the construction of broker services which mediate access to resources. It outlines a framework – the MODELS Information Architecture – for thinking about the components of broker services and their logical arrangement. It describes several development projects and services which show how brokers are developing. It uses examples drawn from the serials environment to describe some of the issues. Technologists understand that they must build more stable and unobtrusive media. They must establish more coherent contexts into which the technology may disappear.