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The purpose of this paper is to focus on selected presentations from the 29th Computers in Libraries (CIL) conference that took place at Washington Hilton hotel, Washington, DC. In addition to its content, the CIL (2014) conference provided opportunities to discuss best practices and emerging issues with IT professionals, vendors and “techno” librarians, especially from North America. There was a conference within a conference – the Internet@Schools track integrated into CIL 2014 as Track E on Monday, April 7, and Tuesday, April 8.

Reports from the viewpoint of a first-time attendee of CIL (2014) present a summary of the selected presentations with more detail on networking events and the exhibition. The CIL (2014) conference attracted librarians from 13 countries other than the USA. It is difficult to document the entire conference happenings in a single report because of several tracks (A-E) and number of speakers; therefore, a selective approach is used.

The CIL (2014) in Washington, DC, is considered a major North American library technology conference for librarians and information managers. As a first-time attendee, the author found that CIL (2014) is informative; it covered technology applications in libraries and strategies to enhance communication – useful to librarians and information professionals both in the USA and internationally. The conference was full of innovative ideas and revealed the diversity of current developments in library service delivery, especially in North America.

Today, more and more library users are using various innovative technologies including mobile apps, data visualization, application programming interfaces, open-source and multimedia. Phones (smart phones) and tablets are emerging as popular choices to access content. This report is a summary of selected educational sessions/presentations in CIL (2014) on diverse technology-related topics, especially mobile technology in libraries that will be of particular interest to readers and useful for professionals who did not attend CIL (2014) in Washington, DC.

Provides an overview of the 19th annual Computers in Libraries conference held in Washington, DC, in March 2004. The main theme of the conference was to focus on “all aspects of library and information delivery technology”. States that the popular topics of discussion were search engine updates, federated searching, blogging, RSS, social networking, institutional repositories, and portals. Notes that the conference was not for the technology beginner or librarians uncomfortable with technology. The conference had over 2,400 attendees from 14 countries and almost every US state, and 50 different exhibitors. It featured over 100 sessions, three keynotes, several pre‐conference and post‐conference workshops, and many 15‐minute “cybertour” sessions in the exhibition area.

Microfoundations of institutions are central to constructing place – the interplay of location, meaning, and material form. Since only a few institutional studies bring materiality to the fore to examine the processes of place-making, how material forms interact with people to institutionalize or de-institutionalize the meaning of place remains a black box. Through an inductive and historical study of Boston’s North End neighborhood, the authors show how material practices shaped place-making and institutionalized, or de-institutionalized, the meaning of the North End. When material practices symbolically encoded meanings of diverse audiences into the church, it created resonance and enabled the building’s meanings to withstand environmental change and become institutionalized as part of the North End’s meaning as a place. In contrast, when the material practices restricted meaning to a specific audience, it limited resonance when the environment changed, was more likely to be demolished and, thus, erased rather than institutionalized into the meaning of the North End as a place.

Life studies are a rich source for further research on the role of the Afro‐American woman in society. They are especially useful to gain a better understanding of the Afro‐American experience and to show the joys, sorrows, needs, and ideals of the Afro‐American woman as she struggles from day to day.

As a business executive and philanthropist, Mary Kay Ash is legendary as a glass-ceiling breaker. With the belief that Mary Kay Ash is both modern and relevant, while simultaneously legendary, the overall purpose of this paper is to explore the role of Mary Kay Ash as an influential entrepreneur. This research responds to the call by Cogliser and Brigham (2004) for an increased understanding of how entrepreneurial leaders influence, challenge, inspire and develop followers.

Following on research by Hoppe (2013), this objective was accomplished via a pentadic analysis of Mary Kay Ash’s rhetoric aimed to influence the mental mindset of readers (followers) over the course of generations. Burke’s pentad was the sense-making tool used for examining Ash’s rhetoric of influence as an entrepreneurial leader. The data used in the pentadic analysis were also analyzed via Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and IBM Watson Emotion Analysis to see where analyses might converge or diverge.

Based on the analysis of her written work, Mary Kay Ash resided at the intersection of leadership and entrepreneurship and, in so doing, was an influencer. Her primary rhetorical approach to influencing was idealism. Interwoven in her writings, she also exhibited both pragmatism and realism. She knew that she had to start the business to have the future she desired and that she needed to train her team appropriately for success to be forthcoming. The motivation in Mary Kay Ash’s rhetoric was that of influencing people so they would be the best that they could be.

Qualitative research brings with it an array of inevitable research problems. Pentadic analysis cannot be judged by the basic objective standards of reliability and validity because objective reality does not exist in personal interpretation. That is, one person as a critic cannot be impartial because the interpretation is only one personal way of viewing the data and another critic might view the same pentads and come up with different ratios. With this subjectivity in mind, however, the data used in the pentadic analysis were also analyzed via LIWC and IBM Watson Emotion Analysis to see where analyses might converge or diverge.

The findings from this research denote clearly that Mary Kay Ash was a forerunner of the modern day influencer. As a primogenitor of the influencer marketing phenomenon, Mary Kay Ash’s entrepreneurial legacy is expected to continue through generations of followers. This finding speaks to the importance of today’s entrepreneurs using the spoken and written word to influence others and create a lasting organizational legacy.

Countless scholars have used pentadic analysis, with a variety of artifacts, to examine the motives behind the rhetoric. However, rhetoric as a means of persuasion and influence has received little attention within the context of the written works by management gurus (Jones et al., 2009), and, aside from the exploration by Berglund and Wigren (2012), the narrative of entrepreneurial influence has not benefitted from close examination.

Cultural visibility is closely linked to physical and social mobility, and access to – or denial of – free movement through private and public spaces powerfully shapes individual and social identities. As Liam Kennedy has shown in the context of urban space, “the operations of power are everywhere evident in space: space is hierarchical – zoned, segregated, gated – and encodes both freedoms and restrictions – of mobility, of access, of vision” (2000, pp. 169–170). A consideration of how film articulates a relationship between space and identity might thus begin by breaking down the concept of space itself into three distinct yet interconnected areas of analysis: first, the notion of socially produced space, as shown in the work of Henri Lefebvre and others; second, the idea of audience space or the architectural space of the theater; and finally, the theory of film space or the space of the screen. Given this essay’s limited scope, the latter will be examined in more detail than the first two, but I would like to stress the underlying interconnectedness of the three. While, for example, formalist studies of film aesthetics may be just as valuable as in-depth studies of changing viewing habits, audience demographics, and exhibition technologies, film interpretation should strive to keep in view the variety of spatial formations and conditions that might come to bear on any particular visual text.