Preservation and conservation decisions in the local library

For a period of years, I have been aware that the decisions regarding preservation which I have made, which I have shared in making, or which have been made by others have not all been of the same nature. The level or levels within the library's staff hierarchy of the persons involved make some decisions differ from other decisions; however, these levels of involvement are not the heart of the problem. The thing lacking was a clear way to designate other distinctions which seemed necessary in attempting to analyze such problems and decisions. I found little help in my reading or sharing experiences with others in attempting to work in this area. In reading the proceedings of the 1976 conference on A National Preservation Program at the Library of Congress, I was therefore quite interested to discover that Daniel Boorstin in opening the conference suggested a division of the questions comprising the problem of preservation. He characterized two rather distinct types of problems as epistemological and technical. He further described the epistemological questions as being social questions, meaning that they are questions relating to the interests of those who will use, administer, and service the materials comprising the collections. I must admit that the term epistemological sent me to the dictionary because it has been some time since I had studied formal philosophical language. At this point, it becomes necessary to understand Boorstin's exact meaning and intention in interjecting this term into the vocabulary of library preservation. Epistemology is defined as "the study of the methods and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity; broadly: the theory of knowledge."published or submitted for publicatio

Explaining the Diversification Path of Exporters in Brazil: How Similar and Sophisticated are New Products?

A stylised fact of the economic literature suggests that export diversification is good for economic growth and is associated with economic development. In addition, there is evidence suggesting that the level of sophistication of countries’ exports “matters” for growth and development. This paper contributes to this literature by analysing two unexplored dimensions of export diversification: the degree of relatedness (similarity) and sophistication of new products in relation to existing ones. The objective of this paper is to understand the mechanisms through which firms are able to diversify to less related and more sophisticated activities. We do so using a unique dataset that links data on exports, innovation and firms’ characteristics at the firm level in Brazil. The main findings suggest that i) diversification occurs in very closely related activities, where firms have some core competences, ii) most diversification occurs in new products with lower level of sophistication than existing exports, iii) the degree of diversification and innovativeness of the production basket, and the position that the firm has developed in the domestic market appear to matter for diversification towards more or less distant products.Diversification; Relatedness; Sophistication; Trade; Innovation; Brazil

Introducing digital literacy skills through IBL: A comparative study of UG and PG business information systems students

This paper reports a comparative study of Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) at Undergraduate (UG) and Postgraduate (PG) levels at a university in the north west of England. Both student cohorts undertook a professional, legal and ethical module centred on IT. This study focuses on how the different student cohorts approached this style of teaching, and how it impacted on overall student engagement throughout the semester. IBL was introduced in the 2009-2010 academic years; to the UG students in the first semester and the PG students in the second semester. Key observations gained from the study were unexpected in that the UG level students fully embraced the IBL approach, they maintained a high attendance level throughout the semester, and all preliminary and formative assessment work/tasks were eagerly completed. Ultimately, this developed students’ information literacy skills. PG students enjoyed the in-class IBL activities, but actively avoided module preparation and formative assessment work/tasks, and so minimized their opportunities to develop rich digital literacy skills. This study highlights potential enablers required to employ IBL techniques successfully

Camera Clubs and Fine Art Photography: Distinguishing Between Art and Amateur Activity

This research examines a medium of symbolic communication--photography--to understand how the social context of the use of that medium shapes its social meaning. Camera club photography is compared with photographic activity which is institutionally legitimized as art, in order to elucidate how art world legitimization shapes the nature of photographic activity. The distinctive featues of art as a communicational system, as manifested in photography, are described. A variety of research methods were employed. Data on camera club activities were gathered through participant-observation over a three year period. Observations of art photography activities such as exhibit openings and conferences were conducted. Interviews augmented observational data: 10 camera club members and 19 art photographers make up the interview sample. Pertinent documents were analyzed as well. Art and camera club photographic activities diverge. Art photography is highly personal and concentrates on representations of artists\u27 ideas. Successful artists contribute innovations to the field. Art photographs do not convey easily interpretable meanings. Successful work is described as mysterious and interpretations involve viewers\u27 own personal reactions to ambiguous content. Conversely camera club photographs are direct, their content straightforward. Camera clubs carry on the pictorialist tradition in photography, updated with borrowings from commercial portraiture, nature and travel photography. Camera club photographers demonstrate their competence through skillful reproduction of the camera club aesthetic code. Innovation and personal self-expression are devalued. Art photography has been constructed in contradistinction to all other uses of the medium. The accessibility of photographic technology to amateurs and professionasl alike, and the ease with which competence in the medium may be attained are inverted in art photography. Art photography transforms this democratic medium into a pursuit requiring special criteria for admission. The relationship between camera club and fine art photography may be described in terms of folklorists\u27 distinctions between folk art and fine art. While innovation attends art world legitimization, the club context frames amateur photography as a traditional activity, maintaining aesthetic values distinct from the art world. Both highly skillful uses of the medium, the social contexts of camera club and fine art photography shape the social meaning of these activities

Advertising Photography: Professional Practice as Commercial Creativity

This thesis examines the concept and practice of creative photographic work within the advertising industry. It argues that while the industry is saturated by, and dependent on, photographic production, analytical work to date has focused merely on a broadly semiotic analysis of the end-product. This thesis instead asks how and why photographs are made in the ways they are? As such, it refigures the understanding of advertising photography by bringing practice and production into the centre of the analysis. Central to the analysis are the practices, processes and tacit systems of knowledge, understanding, and recognition which combine to define ‘good’ and even ‘iconic’ photography as a practice that characterizes and rewards itself on its photographic creativity. A practitioner-led definition of creativity is determined that complicates the established study of advertising creativity. This is based on a survey of photographic practitioners and interviews with industry practitioners in advertising and photography. The examination of advertising production identifies where creativity ‘happens’, how the agency creative and photographer collaborate and demonstrates how the photographer asserts their creative skills onto the production process. This is followed by a consideration of how photographic creativity is measured and particularly focuses on the importance of iconic images and their influence on practice over time. The thesis argues for, and analyses, an evolving visual language within advertising, driven by practitioner views of creativity, iconicity, and the macro effects of global events, economic cycles and technological development. This approach is tested through the case study of the British information and communications technology industry between 1979 and 2009, drawing on and collating the image archives of the industry. Overall the research opens new perspectives on advertising practice by both situating photography and the practices of the photographers centrally within the analysis

Trade Intermediation and the Organization of Exporters

The business literature shows that exporting firms typically require the help of foreign trade intermediaries or need to set up own foreign wholesale affiliates. In contrast, conventional trade theory models assume that producers can directly access foreign consumers. This paper models the endogenous emergence of intermediaries in an international trade model where producers differ with respect to productivity as well as regarding their varieties' perceived quality and tradability. We assume that trade intermediation is prone to frictions due to the absence of enorceable cross-country contracts while own wholesale subsidiaries require capital investment. We derive the sorting pattern of firms according to their degree of competitive advantage and show how the relative prevalence of intermediation depends on the degree of heterogeneity among producers, on the importance of market-specificity of goods, or on expropriation risk. We use US export data for 50 sectors and 133 destination countries to check the empirical validity of this predictions and find robust empirical support. JEL classifcation: F12, F23Trade intermediation, international trade, heterogeneous rms, incomplete contracts.

Learning, Internal Research, and Spillovers Evidence from a Sample of R&D Laboratories

This paper presents new evidence on the practice of industrial Research and Development (R&D), especially the allocation between learning and internal research, and the role of outside knowledge, as represented by R&D spillovers, in reshaping this allocation. The evidence describes the sources of outside knowledge, portrays the flow of that knowledge into firms, and interprets the channels by which outside knowledge influences R&D. The empirical work is based on a sample of 220 R&D laboratories owned by 115 firms in the U.S. chemicals, machinery, electrical equipment, and motor vehicles industries. The findings are consistent with the view that universities and firms generate technological opportunities in R&D laboratories. In addition to partnerships that define rather strict channels of opportunity, the paper uncovers broader effects of R&D spillovers. The results also suggest that academic spillovers drive learning about universities, and that industrial spillovers drive learning about industry. In this way externally derived opportunities reshape the rate and direction of R&D. Overall the findings paint an image of practitioners of industrial R&D reaching aggressively for opportunities, rather than waiting for opportunities to come to them.

Intuition, expertise and judgement in the capture and assessment of photographic images

The aim of this thesis is to contribute to our theoretical and experiential understanding of the exercise of multivariate, short time-slice photographic judgement. This research is grounded in both the ontology and the psychology of nonconscious (intuitive) cognition and its orthogonal interaction with conscious thought at the moment of capture or assessment of a photographic image. My principal mode of empirical investigation uses a cross-sectional, correlational design employing a testing instrument, the Intuitive Mastery Photography Test (the IMP Test) originally developed to support Ryan (2017). The tests were conducted upon a mixed sample of 106 amateur and professional photographers, twenty of whom also participated in an unstructured intraspective interview. The testing and interviews establish: (i) that ten constructs satisfactorily enclose the concept of expertise for this sample of photographers in this domain, (ii) that partitioning on the basis of inter alia gender, photographic qualification and genre produce significant differences in the engagement and conjugation of the ten constructs in the intuitive moment of capture or assessment, and (iii) that ‘style’ or ‘voice’ can be explained as an emergent property derived from the complexities of the exercise of expert, intuitive, photographic judgement. I conclude that, notwithstanding the sample size, there are grounds for strong confidence that the testing is of high external validity as a tool for individual analysis and modest confidence that it is also valid for the partitioned sub-groups