How Do You Like Your Books: Print or Digital? An Analysis on Print and E-book Usage at The Graduate School of Education

The shift from physical materials to digital holdings has slowly infiltrated libraries across the globe, and librarians are struggling to make sense of these intangible, and sometimes fleeting, resources. Materials budgets have shifted to accommodate large journal and database subscriptions, single-title article access, and most recently, e-book holdings. This analysis measures the impact of digital acquisitions in an academic setting during a highly transformative period of library practices. The study finds that both electronic and print books are valuable to the academic research community at GSE

Being Digital Citizens (Second Edition)

From the rise of cyberbullying and hactivism to the issues surrounding digital privacy rights and freedom of speech, the Internet is changing the ways in which we govern and are governed as citizens. This book examines how citizens encounter and perform new sorts of rights, duties, opportunities and challenges through the Internet. By disrupting prevailing understandings of citizenship and cyberspace, the authors highlight the dynamic relationship between these two concepts. Rather than assuming that these are static or established “facts” of politics and society, the book shows how the challenges and opportunities presented by the Internet inevitably impact upon the action and understanding of political agency. In doing so, it investigates how we conduct ourselves in cyberspace through digital acts. This book provides a new theoretical understanding of what it means to be a citizen today for students and scholars across the social sciences

Copyright and Musicians at the Digital Margins

While there is research into consumer attitudes to copyright and downloading, and the music industry has made clear its own views in evidence to the Hargreaves Review and other forums, relatively little is known about musicians’ attitudes to copyright. This article reports on those musicians who are negotiating the new terrain created by digitization and its accompanying business models. Are their attitudes to copyright simply determined by their financial self-interest and a sense of ownership of their music, or do they see copyright as a restriction of their creative freedom? Using the results of a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews with UK musicians, we show how a variety of factors – including generic conventions, knowledge and experience, and wider social values – contribute to attitudes to copyright. Although knowledge of, and interest in, copyright can be driven by financial self-interest, other considerations are in play. These findings have, as we explain, implications both for copyright policy and for an understanding of creative practice in a digital economy. If the assumption is that copyright is designed to serve the interests and facilitate the creativity of musicians, this view is not always shared by the intended beneficiaries