Is there a second life for librarians?

The purpose of this paper is to explore the roles of libraries within Second Life from the viewpoint of the librarians experienced in experimenting within virtual worlds. Exploration of currently available literature was undertaken to determine the important issues affecting libraries and librarians within virtual worlds. To explore these issues further, ten Second Life librarians were interviewed in order to distinguish which were most important and why. There is considerable diversity in the opinions of Second Life librarians, but all interviewees shared the belief that their efforts within Second Life had helped others and improved their own professional development. There was a strong consensus that it was important for librarians to embrace Second Life now, in order to be prepared for a future when virtual worlds, although perhaps not Second Life itself, were commonplace. Virtual worlds are growing in popularity, particularly with younger generations. If they are to be accepted as part of a multidimensional information space, the possibilities available within the virtual space need to be appreciated and understood by the information community. Librarians have a responsibility to aid their users in understanding the complexity and possibilities of information provision and delivery offered by virtual worlds. This can only occur by accepting and supporting experiments in environments like Second Life. This paper illustrates to the library community how Second Life is currently being used to provide information services, and to further an understanding of how the entire information community can benefit from embracing the possibility of exploring virtual worlds

Manna from heaven: The exuberance of food as a topic for research in management and organization

Organizations have, in the past, often been discussed as if they were Cartesian mentalities, planning agendas, learning from doing, processing information, reducing equivocality, mimicking and copying, floating disembodiedly apart from the actors who work in these organizations. We are offered representations of organizations as organically grounded metaphors that minimize the biological facticity of employees: namely, their need for food. While the inputs to organizations conceived as if they were quasi-systems are well explored, and the emotional and 'irrational' side of organizations is increasingly discussed, the necessity of inputs to the biological systems that staff them is not. Nonetheless, despite the lack of explicit scholarly attention to food at work, its importance guarantees its hidden presence in the organizational literature, often in the context of more 'serious' themes. We identify four approaches to the relationship between food, work and organization. For dessert, we propose a research menu that aims to uncover several possibilities for making the role of food in organizational life more explicit. © 2008 The Tavistock Institute « SAGE Publications Los Angeles

The evolving SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in Africa: Insights from rapidly expanding genomic surveillance

The past 2 years, during which waves of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) variants swept the globe, have starkly highlighted health disparities across nations. Tegally et al. show how the coordinated efforts of talented African scientists have in a short time made great contributions to pandemic surveillance and data gathering. Their efforts and initiatives have provided early warning that has likely benefited wealthier countries more than their own. Genomic surveillance identified the emergence of the highly transmissible Beta and Omicron variants and now the appearance of Omicron sublineages in Africa. However, it is imperative that technology transfer for diagnostics and vaccines, as well the logistic wherewithal to produce and deploy them, match the data-gathering effort