The President of ALIA writes about expectations for the Public Libraries Summit, and provides an account of what took place on the day of the meeting, and what has taken place since. In funding terms, the most likely areas of productive engagement with the federal government are considered to be: children, early learning and a literate Australia;…

Like homeowners with limited budgets and a long list of repairs, school districts often must make tough choices when it comes to deciding what building systems to modernize, renovate, or repair--or when to build new facilities. With $44 billion now available for states and schools under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, stimulus…

At a time when the evolutionary pace of new media resembles the real-time mutation of certain microorganisms, the age-old question of how best to connect with constituents can seem impossibly complex--even for an elite institution plugged into the motherboard of Silicon Valley. Identifying the most effective vehicle for reaching a particular…

Portents of the demise of the Professional Doctorate have emerged in some recent policy and institutional circles in Australia, raising questions about the meaning and relevance of the Professional Doctorate in an era of "league tables" and research assessment in Australia. This article argues that such portents, based largely on narrow…

"Strategy" is a word that has had an increasing use in recent years. The discipline of organisational studies has adopted this concept to set out the primacy of good business practices, such as foretelling risk and opportunity. Government policy documents use the term where medium- and long-term goals are set out, for example, the New…

There are few professional development courses in Australia for the rural sector concerned with climate variability, climate change and sustainable agriculture. The lack of educators with a sound technical background in climate science and its applications in agriculture prevents the delivery of courses either stand-alone or embedded in other…

As governments in many countries review their education systems to optimise their human capital in an age of globalisation, religious schools such as madrasahs (Islamic or Muslim schools) have also come under state scrutiny. This article examines the Singapore government's reform agenda for madrasah education in the country. It argues that the…

Many studies have been conducted on the internationalization of higher education. Yet little is known about institutional plans for internationalization. This article presents the results of a study conducted with the American Council on Education's Center for International Initiatives on the types, prevalence, development, implementation, and…

Publishing is the sleeping beast that faculty at college like the College of St. Catherine, a 5,000-student women's college in Minnesota's Twin Cities, have tiptoed around for years. Here, as in many institutions devoted to undergraduate teaching, professors could once amble undisturbed along the promotion path equipped only with pedagogical…

In the conventional education process, there have always been certain obstacles throughout the human history. From that point of view, "Open and Distance Education" are the ones which are much more sensitive to quality and to the dissemination of knowledge to society as well as having certain advantages in getting over matters rather…

Relationships between strategic HRD practices and organizational learning were explored through a literature review. Organizations that learn and develop their SHRD practices have more opportunities to obtain and integrate the nine SHRD outcomes in the learning process: organizational missions and goals, top management leadership, environmental…

The authors are both managers in OhioLINK libraries and have complex experiences working within a variety of simultaneous library consortial agreements. Their librarians'-eye view of consortia allows for a discussion of the nature of that landscape, some perspectives on the benefits and advantages of consortia as well as thoughts on the challenges…

This paper describes the experience of one university in developing a Shared Vision and planning strategically for achieving it. At Indiana University Northwest, strategic planning is an ongoing process that is moving the campus toward its vision for the future and the long-term outcomes derived from it. Unlike traditional strategic outcomes that…

In this article, the author shares her accomplishments as the 2006-2007 president of the American Association of School Librarians. Many of her accomplishments help fulfill the goals, objectives, and strategies of the AASL strategic plan. These include the sold-out AASL National Institute on assessment, new innovative reading grants, and its…

The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) led the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) contribution to the International Human Genome Project, whose primary goal was the sequencing of the human genome. This project was successfully completed in April 2003. Now, the NHGRI's mission is focused on a broad range of studies aimed at…