Information behaviour of music record collectors

Introduction: Using Stebbins's concept of 'serious leisure' and Savolainen's concept of 'everyday life information practices', this study explores the information behaviour of music record collectors. Method: An ethnographic approach was used for the study; the main data collection instrument was in-depth, semi-structured interviews with eight record collectors based in and around London, carried out in participants' homes, combined with photographs of their collections and observation of their use of preferred Websites. Analysis: Qualitative analysis was carried out on the survey, with triangulation through conversations with other record collectors, visits to record shops, and examination of some Websites named by participants. Results: The results reveal distinctive information behaviour for record collectors, with specialist knowledge, and a variety of information sources. The Internet has had, and continues to have, a profound effect on both information gathering and acquisition. Conclusions: The study shows that record collectors are exemplars of serious leisure practitioners, with distinct information behaviour. The results add to the knowledge of serious leisure as a topic for study within information science

A study of the information needs of the users of a folk music library and the implications for the design of a digital library system

A qualitative study of user information needs is reported, based on a purposive sample of users and potential users of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, a small specialist folk music library in North London. The study set out to establish what the user’s (both existing and potential) information needs are, so that the library’s online service may take them into account with its design. The information needs framework proposed by Nicholas (2000) is used as an analytical tool to achieve this end. The demographics of the users were examined in order to establish four user groups: Performer, Academic, Professional and Enthusiast. Important information needs were found to be based on social interaction, and key resources of the library were its staff, the concentration of the collection and the library’s social nature. A collection of broad design requirements are proposed based on the analysis and this study also provided some insights into the issue of musical relevance, which are discussed

Rethinking authenticity in digital art preservation

In this paper I am discussing the repositioning of traditional conservation concepts of historicity, authenticity and versioning in relation to born digital artworks, upon findings from my research on preservation of computer-based artifacts. Challenges for digital art preservation and previous work in this area are described, followed by an analysis of digital art as a process of components interaction, as performance and in terms of instantiations. The concept of dynamic authenticity is proposed, and it is argued that our approach to digital artworks preservation should be variable and digital object responsive, with a level of variability tolerance to match digital art intrinsic variability and dynamic authenticity

EN-BIRTH Data Collector Training - Handbook and Manual

The EN-BIRTH study aims to validate selected newborn and maternal indicators for routine facility-based tracking of coverage and quality of care for use at district, national and global levels. The item contains the EN-BIRTH_Trainer's Manual (14 June 2017) and EN-BIRTH_Training Handbook (23 May 2017)

'I saw America changed through music': An examination of the American collecting tradition

This thesis is concerned with the history of folk music collecting in America and seeks to demonstrate the overriding importance of the political, socio – cultural, intellectual, and technological contexts on this work of folk music collecting. It does so via an examination the work of five of the principal folk music collectors in America in the 19th and 20th centuries: Francis Child, Cecil Sharp, John Lomax, Alan Lomax, and Harry Smith, arguing that the work of each of them was impacted by various contexts which were central to their theories of folk music, their collecting methodologies, and what they did with the material they collected. Each of these collectors, whose work was governed by the context in which they were working, introduced transformations in the theory, practice, and output of folk music collecting. These transformations are held to represent the American collecting tradition, and are in fact what define the American collecting tradition and allow it to continue developing as a discipline from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries

Gear Acquisition Syndrome

"Gear Acquisition Syndrome, also known as GAS, is commonly understood as the musicians’ unrelenting urge to buy and own instruments and equipment as an anticipated catalyst of creative energy and bringer of happiness. For many musicians, it involves the unavoidable compulsion to spend money one does not have on gear perhaps not even needed. The urge is directed by the belief that acquiring another instrument will make one a better player. This book pioneers research into the complex phenomenon named GAS from a variety of disciplines, including popular music studies and music technology, cultural and leisure studies, consumption research, sociology, psychology and psychiatry. The newly created theoretical framework and empirical studies of online communities and offline music stores allow the study to consider musical, social and personal motives, which influence the way musicians think about and deal with equipment. As is shown, GAS encompasses a variety of practices and psychological processes. In an often life-long endeavour, upgrading the rig is accompanied by musical learning processes in popular music.

FinBook: literary content as digital commodity

This short essay explains the significance of the FinBook intervention, and invites the reader to participate. We have associated each chapter within this book with a financial robot (FinBot), and created a market whereby book content will be traded with financial securities. As human labour increasingly consists of unstable and uncertain work practices and as algorithms replace people on the virtual trading floors of the worlds markets, we see members of society taking advantage of FinBots to invest and make extra funds. Bots of all kinds are making financial decisions for us, searching online on our behalf to help us invest, to consume products and services. Our contribution to this compilation is to turn the collection of chapters in this book into a dynamic investment portfolio, and thereby play out what might happen to the process of buying and consuming literature in the not-so-distant future. By attaching identities (through QR codes) to each chapter, we create a market in which the chapter can ‘perform’. Our FinBots will trade based on features extracted from the authors’ words in this book: the political, ethical and cultural values embedded in the work, and the extent to which the FinBots share authors’ concerns; and the performance of chapters amongst those human and non-human actors that make up the market, and readership. In short, the FinBook model turns our work and the work of our co-authors into an investment portfolio, mediated by the market and the attention of readers. By creating a digital economy specifically around the content of online texts, our chapter and the FinBook platform aims to challenge the reader to consider how their personal values align them with individual articles, and how these become contested as they perform different value judgements about the financial performance of each chapter and the book as a whole. At the same time, by introducing ‘autonomous’ trading bots, we also explore the different ‘network’ affordances that differ between paper based books that’s scarcity is developed through analogue form, and digital forms of books whose uniqueness is reached through encryption. We thereby speak to wider questions about the conditions of an aggressive market in which algorithms subject cultural and intellectual items – books – to economic parameters, and the increasing ubiquity of data bots as actors in our social, political, economic and cultural lives. We understand that our marketization of literature may be an uncomfortable juxtaposition against the conventionally-imagined way a book is created, enjoyed and shared: it is intended to be

Materializing digital collecting: an extended view of digital materiality

If digital objects are abundant and ubiquitous, why should consumers pay for, much less collect them? The qualities of digital code present numerous challenges for collecting, yet digital collecting can and does occur. We explore the role of companies in constructing digital consumption objects that encourage and support collecting behaviours, identifying material configuration techniques that materialise these objects as elusive and authentic. Such techniques, we argue, may facilitate those pleasures of collecting otherwise absent in the digital realm. We extend theories of collecting by highlighting the role of objects and the companies that construct them in materialising digital collecting. More broadly, we extend theories of digital materiality by highlighting processes of digital material configuration that occur in the pre-objectification phase of materialisation, acknowledging the role of marketing and design in shaping the qualities exhibited by digital consumption objects and consequently related consumption behaviours and experiences

The Allure of Celebrities: Unpacking Their Polysemic Consumer Appeal

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version.To explain their deep resonance with consumers this paper unpacks the individual constituents of a celebrity’s polysemic appeal. While celebrities are traditionally theorised as unidimensional ‘semiotic receptacles of cultural meaning’, we conceptualise them here instead as human beings/performers with a multi-constitutional, polysemic consumer appeal. Supporting evidence is drawn from autoethnographic data collected over a total period of 25 months and structured through a hermeneutic analysis. In ‘rehumanising’ the celebrity, the study finds that each celebrity offers the individual consumer a unique and very personal parasocial appeal as a) the performer, b) the ‘private’ person behind the public performer, c) the tangible manifestation of either through products, and d) the social link to other consumers. The stronger these constituents, individually or symbiotically, appeal to the consumer’s personal desires the more s/he feels emotionally attached to this particular celebrity. Although using autoethnography means that the breadth of collected data is limited, the depth of insight this approach garners sufficiently unpacks the polysemic appeal of celebrities to consumers. The findings encourage talent agents, publicists and marketing managers to reconsider underlying assumptions in their talent management and/or celebrity endorsement practices. While prior research on celebrity appeal has tended to enshrine celebrities in a “dehumanised” structuralist semiosis, which erases the very idea of individualised consumer meanings, this paper reveals the multi-constitutional polysemy of any particular celebrity’s personal appeal as a performer and human being to any particular consumer