The Right Place at the Right Time: Creative Spaces in Libraries

Purpose This essay explores the recent trend in libraries: that of the establishment of spaces specifically set aside for creative work. The rise of these dedicated creative spaces is owed to a confluence of factors that happen to be finding their expression together in recent years. This essay examines the history of these spaces and explores the factors that gave rise to them and will fuel them moving forward. Design/Methodology/Approach A viewpoint piece, this essay combines historical research and historical/comparative analyses to examine the ways by which libraries have supported creative work in the past and how they may continue to do so into the 21st century. Findings The key threads brought together include a societal recognition of the value of creativity and related skills and attributes; the philosophies, values, and missions of libraries in both their longstanding forms and in recent evolutions; the rise of participatory culture as a result of inexpensive technologies; improved means to build community and share results of efforts; and library experience and historical practice in matters related to creativity. The chapter concludes with advice for those interested in the establishment of such spaces, grounding those reflections in the author’s experiences in developing a new creative space at Virginia Commonwealth University. Originality/value While a number of pieces have been written that discuss the practicalities of developing certain kinds of creative spaces, very little has been written that situates these spaces in larger social and library professional contexts; this essay begins to fill that gap

Fred Bartenstein: The Right Place at the Right Time

Fred Bartenstein has always seemed to find himself perfectly situated to pursue his life-long interest in bluegrass music – as he puts it, “I’ve always seemed to be in the right place at the right time.” This luck has allowed him to find bluegrass in the most surprising places, whether at a private day school in New Jersey, or at Harvard University in the late 1960s. It has also meant that, among other things, he found himself attending the first bluegrass festival in Fincastle, Va., becoming a bluegrass DJ at the age of 16, starting Muleskinner News magazine, and playing rhythm guitar and singing with a long list of pickers from Don Stover and John Hartford to Frank Wakefield and Dorsey Harvey

The right place at the right time: assisting spatio-temporal planning in construction

21st - 24th October 2003 This paper describes research carried out for requirements capture in the development of a computer-based decision support tool (VIRCON) for space-time scheduling and visualisation of construction tasks. The focus was on pre-tender work and involved interviews with construction planners. Both space-time scheduling and visualisation of tasks are largely informal/intuitive processes for planners. They form an important part of the planner\'s risk identification function. Planners tend to opt for a robust spatio-temporal schedule rather than an optimal one. They require decision support tools that are quick and easy to use rather than highly sophisticated. The research highlights the extent to which construction planning is a communicative and co-operative activity in addition to a complex problem-solving one. Questions arise about the cost to the client of non-involvement by the construction planner at the design stage, the costs of short pre-tender periods, inadequate design data and sub-optimal construction periods specified in tender documents

Technologies for learning: The right time at the right place

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/87320/2/360_1.pd

The right expert at the right time and place: From expertise identification to expertise selection

We propose a unified and complete solution for expert finding in organizations, including not only expertise identification, but also expertise selection functionality. The latter two include the use of implicit and explicit preferences of users on meeting each other, as well as localization and planning as important auxiliary processes. We also propose a solution for privacy protection, which is urgently required in view of the huge amount of privacy sensitive data involved. Various parts are elaborated elsewhere, and we look forward to a realization and usage of the proposed system as a whole

Location – Positioning Tregs to the right place at the right time

After a fruitless pursuit for suppressor cells spanning 1970s to mid-80s, the identification of CD4+CD25+ T cellsas a specific T-cell lineage with immune regulatory function in the 1990s has revived the theory of active immune tolerance and uncovered a brand-new avenue for immunologic research. Tregs have been shown to play a crucial role both in health and diseases. Whilst tremendous advance has been made in our understanding of the expanding varieties of effector mechanisms exploited by Tregs, the migration phenotypes as well as the anatomic sites where Tregs exert immune regulation are scarcely investigated. Migration of Tregs to either the lymph nodes or peripheral tissues has been shown to be exclusively indispensable in Treg-mediated immune regulation in a variety of experimental models with specific gene-targeted mice. The once seemingly paradoxical findings are partly reconciled by later discovery of various Treg subsets with distinct migration/homing property as well as the inflammatory stage when Tregs come into play along an immune reaction. In our recent study, we investigated the migration characteristics of Treg cells by using the endothelial cell-based shear-stress flow assay that resembles the intravascular blood flow system. We found that both FoxP3-expressing Tregs and anergic T cells generated by blockage of costimulation factors, CD80 and CD86, exhibited a significantly decreased adhesion to endothelial cells as compared to antigen-activated effector T cells (66~88 % reduction). The less migration phenotype hinted inefficient tissue trafficking of the Tregs and suggested the lymph nodes as the anatomic site where Tregs optimally exerted immune regulation. To this speculation, an essential role of Treg lymph node positioning in exerting immune suppression was demonstrated by the inability of adoptively transferred Tregs to prevent footpad inflammation after blockage of lymph node entry of these Tregs by CCR7 or CD62L Ab. Therapeutic modality targeting leukocyte migration has been a mainstay alternative for immunologic diseases. Important messages have arisen for treatments of this kind and Treg-based cell therapy that whilst inflammatory response can be harnessed by modulating the migration property of leukocytes, the relationship between Treg migration phenotypes and their immune regulatory function should always be taken into consideration

Smad phosphoisoform signaling specificity: the right place at the right time

Transforming growth factor (TGF)-β antagonizes mitogenic Ras signaling during epithelial regeneration, but TGF-β and Ras act synergistically in driving tumor progression. Insights into these apparently contradictory effects have come from recent detailed analyses of the TGF-β signaling process. Here, we summarize the different modes of TGF-β/Ras signaling in normal epithelium and neoplasms and show how perturbation of TGF-β signaling by Ras may contribute to a shift from tumor-suppressive to protumorigenic TGF-β activity during tumor progression. Smad proteins, which convey signals from TGF-β receptors to the nucleus, have intermediate linker regions between conserved Mad homology (MH) 1 and MH2 domains. TGF-β Type I receptor and Ras-associated kinases differentially phosphorylate Smad2 and Smad3 to create C-terminally (C), linker (L) or dually (L/C) phosphorylated (p) isoforms. In epithelial homeostasis, TGF-β-mediated pSmad3C signaling opposes proliferative responses induced by mitogenic signals. During carcinogenesis, activation of cytoplasmic Ras-associated kinases including mitogen-activated protein kinase confers a selective advantage on benign tumors by shifting Smad3 signaling from a tumor-suppressive pSmad3C to an oncogenic pSmad3L pathway, leading to carcinoma in situ. Finally, at the edges of advanced carcinomas invading adjacent tissues, nuclear Ras-associated kinases such as cyclin-dependent kinases, together with cytoplasmic kinases, alter TGF-β signals to more invasive and proliferative pSmad2L/C and pSmad3L/C signaling. Taken together, TGF-β signaling specificity arises from spatiotemporal dynamics of Smad phosphoisoforms. Based on these findings, we have reason to hope that pharmacologic inhibition of linker phosphorylation might suppress progression to human advanced carcinomas by switching from protumorigenic to tumor-suppressive TGF-β signaling