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The purpose of this paper is to focus on a designed research methodology to distil existing research findings from an esrc/ahrc funded japan/uk network on location-based virtual reality experiences for children in order to generate new knowledge.

The structured co-production methodology was undertaken in three stages. These were: (1) a collaborative workshop which produced a series of collage narratives, (2) collaborating with a non-human entity in the form of a digital coded tool to reconfigure the workshop responses and mediate the hierarchy of roles, (3) the co-production of a zine as a collaborative reflection method, which shared via postal service enabled a dialogue and exchange of round Robin interventions by the network members.

The analysis of the data collected in this study highlighted five themes that could be used by other researchers on a wide range of projects. These were: (1) knowing through making, (2) the importance of process, (3) beyond linear representations, (4) agency of physical materials and (5) agency of digital code.

The context of the study being undertaken during the first phase of the global pandemic, revealed insight into a method of co-production that was undertaken under emergency remote working conditions. The knowledge generated from this can be applied to other research contexts such as working with researchers or participants across global borders without the need to travel.

The research provides an innovative rethinking of co-production methods in order to generate new knowledge from multidisciplinary and multimodal research.

Beyond the idea of the city as ‘an abstract terrain for business operations’ (Greenfield, 2013), this chapter analyses alternative constructions and research processes for engaging with ideas of smart cities and digital spatiality, drawing upon the author's arts-based research making virtual reality installations. The chapter describes workshops in which participants have navigated virtual and analogue city spaces, discussing their own ideas of smartness and the mapping of cities. These workshops took place off and online, collaboratively framing intelligences beyond the extractivist logic of surveillance and the Internet of things. In the making of this work, questions of what we mean by smartness and futurity were materialised. The chapter expands on these projects and questions, asking what kinds of design prevents social equality (Ansari, 2020; Irani, 2015), who is left out of these constructs and why? The author draws upon this work in relation to Waterford, examining how the specific historical and contemporary contexts and topography of the city informs a situated approach to technologies of representation. Rivers, from the Thames to the ‘artificial’ Huangpu, the Suir and John's River in Waterford, in their contingency and ontological instability, run through the chapter as a situating, post-human presence.

There is a rich literary tradition of depicting human-dwelling places (usually houses) as living bodies, stretching from the Middle Ages to contemporary fiction. On several occasions, the interaction between the characters in these works and the house-body entity described has taken the form of a digestive journey. Rooms come to symbolise mouths, kitchens and even bowels, and sometimes the human body and mind are gradually incorporated into the external architectural space. This chapter examines two literary works in which this occurs – the ‘House of Temperance’ in Spencer's The Faerie Queene (1590) and Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959). These two examples, from two very different literary traditions (Renaissance allegorical and modern Gothic horror respectively) show the fine line between revelation and horror, how spatial materiality and meaning are flexible and how a building may transform the character within it both psychologically and physically.

For front‐line reference and instruction librarians, for public service managers and administrators, “keeping up” today is indeed a tall order. The purpose of this paper is to present the broad dimensions of reference and instructional services in today's academic, public and special libraries.

The paper presents the articles in this issue of RSR as reflecting the multifaceted dimensions of reference and instructional services in libraries of all sizes and types.

Experienced academic librarians know that staying abreast of what is happening in academe, of developments in information technology, and of current events in related fields, constitutes one of the critical (and often vexing) challenges facing one's peers and colleagues. A myriad resources exist to help one to keep up with change, new developments, technology, and trends, including, for example, Weblogs, listservs, web sites, e‐mail, newspapers, scholarly journals in library and information science and those in related disciplines. Similarly, a myriad techniques exist to help one to develop a better strategy for keeping up, including distributed e‐mailed daily reports from news sources, subscribing to selected web sites, RSS feeds, and news aggregators.

The paper shows how the challenge of “keeping up” can be accomplished with the use of emerging technologies.

Whenever one encounters a great performance on the sports field, in the arts, or in politics, one is immediately conscious of the person's confidence. Whether one is watching Torvill and Dean, Ashkenazy, or the truly great political figures, there is a poise, a certainty, which transmits a positive influence.

THERE was an air of expectancy about the audience which assembled at Draper's Hall on October 27th to hear the address with which the President of the Board of Education inaugurated the session of the London Branch of the Library Association. Quite unjustifiably, we fear, because it rested upon the expectation, or hope, that the noble and right honourable gentleman would deliver his views of library policy in anticipation of the report of the Trevelyan Committee. Lord Eustace Percy's speech was charming, was stimulating, and was an excellent statement of certain elementary ideals, which, though familiar to us all, cannot be emphasised too often. It was, indeed, exactly the type of speech which a cultured and skilful statesman must make (if he have the ability) to such an audience as ours, which would dearly have liked to hear him say something nearer to what was in their own minds. It said nothing whatever about the Committee, or even referred to its existence. Of course, no minister would or could anticipate the deliberations of any body which had not yet finished its work.