Digital Code of Life : How Bionformatics is Revolutionizing Science,Medicine, and Business

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Scenario Planning and Libraries

• In many places, not least the United Kingdom, libraries have been faced with a struggle to maintain branches and services • Expectations – and hopes – that the future of libraries was assured proved unfounded, due to erroneous assumptions about the context in which they operated • Scenario planning offers a powerful tool for testing assumptions, exploring the interrelation between trends, and developing strategies that put institutions and sectors in a better position to face the future. Libraries could gain from adopting such an approac

Against neoliberalism as a concept

Neoliberalism is a slippery concept, neither intellectually precise nor political useful. It is used so widely, to mean such different things, that it becomes almost impossibly vague, while dissimilar international experiences of social change undermine the sweeping designation provided by most presentations of neoliberalism. The term is too often used as a catch-all category or as a category that catches selectively whatever a particular author chooses and disapproves. It is a word of the academic ‘left’, accepted neither by our opponents, the supposed neoliberals, nor in popular discourse, and its use perpetuates a self-referential world of our own. There is little new or liberal in the ideas or practices of ‘neoliberalism’. The term is politically unhelpful, little use in identifying strategic priorities. A tendency to reproduce a binary, which posits the state as good and market as bad, is particularly unhelpful