Beyond books: the concept of the academic library as learning space

© 2016, © Emerald Group Publishing Limited. Purpose: The paper aims to explore the issues surrounding the user conceptualisation of academic libraries. The paper will solidify the role of academic libraries as learning spaces and problematise how libraries are conceptualised by users. Design/methodology/approach: The paper is a literature-based conceptual paper and draws on a wide range of literature to challenge the concept of academic libraries and presents how they are becoming reframed as different spaces. Findings: The paper argues that the concept of a library is at risk. While libraries have undergone substantial changes, the concept of a library has lingered. This paper demonstrated that libraries need to proactively engage users in this debate. Originality/value: The spatial approach taken by this paper demonstrates the complicity behind the user conceptualisation of libraries. Developing an understanding of this process is an important foundation for libraries to develop their user engagement

Learning development in a time of disruption

The Covid-19 Pandemic had (and continues to have) a significant worldwide impact on Higher Education (Watermeyer et al., 2021; Sharaievska et al., 2022). How Learning Development responded to this challenge varied considerably across the sector.Many of the challenges and solutions for Learning Development are represented in the Compendium of Innovative Practice: Learning Development in a Time of Disruption, a special issue of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education (JLDHE, 2021). The Compendium issue of JLDHE contained 102 peer-reviewed reflections, identifying numerous challenges and responses to teaching in Covid-19.This conference paper will share the findings of a research project that has systematically analysed all 102 contributions to the compendium. Each reflection was analysed using structural, topic and thematic coding to identify common responses and challenges to pandemic teaching.The findings of this study have identified a range of individual and shared challenges for both students and third space professionals. One of the core findings relates to the diversity of responses that have been designed to meet these challenges, with over 100 distinct pedagogic and technical solutions to pandemic teaching. From these, five core themes have emerged: emergency remote teaching; reflective practice and evaluation; pedagogy and technology support; collaboration and shared practice; and, course design for the long-term.This paper will reflect on implications for future practice in times of disruption and provide delegates with the opportunity to consider how it relates to their institutions

Fat for an Asian : The Embodiment of Asian Stereotypes in an Online Community

Previous research has suggested that different racial groups have differing expectations of body size, but Asian Americans have largely been absent from this literature. Thick Dumpling Skin, a blog that focuses on body image issues and eating disorders in the Asian American community, provides an opportunity to study this unexplored topic. Thick Dumpling Skin is highly interactive and features submitted posts from multiple users. Using qualitative content analysis to code archived blog posts from 2011 to 2014, this paper studies how online users in this community come to embody stereotypes regarding the Asian body. In my analysis, I discuss how users define the ideal Asian body in ways that make thinness and Asian-ness synonymous. To members of this community, being a fat Asian is a contradiction and threat to their Asian identity. Using the microaggressions literature, I examine the potential psychological consequences of not fitting the ideal Asian body. This paper also asserts that Asians do subscribe to a thin ideal, but it is not the same ideal held by whites. I conceptualize the need to attain the perfect Asian body as the embodiment of the model minority stereotype

Marx v. Flanigan: A Discussion on Abortion

Dr. Richard Flanigan looked up from the magazine he had been perusing. Several cancellations at the women’s center that afternoon left him with some free time before his next appointment. Flanigan felt disgust for the young women who had called that morning to say they had a change of heart about the procedure. Oh well! So what if a few easily swayed teens fell for the pro-life rhetoric? With the free time, he sat down at the receptionist’s desk, preparing to while away the hour with some light reading. An older man, with a bushy beard and dressed in old fashioned clothes, appeared in the clinic waiting room. The stranger bore a striking resemblance to a picture Flanigan remembered from an old college textbook – a picture of Karl Marx

Safe, Flexible Aliasing with Deferred Borrows

In recent years, programming-language support for static memory safety has developed significantly. In particular, borrowing and ownership systems, such as the one pioneered by the Rust language, require the programmer to abide by certain aliasing restrictions but in return guarantee that no unsafe aliasing can ever occur. This allows parallel code to be written, or existing code to be parallelized, safely and easily, and the aliasing restrictions also statically prevent a whole class of bugs such as iterator invalidation. Borrowing is easy to reason about because it matches the intuitive ownership-passing conventions often used in systems languages. Unfortunately, a borrowing-based system can sometimes be too restrictive. Because borrows enforce aliasing rules for their entire lifetimes, they cannot be used to implement some common patterns that pointers would allow. Programs often use pseudo-pointers, such as indices into an array of nodes or objects, instead, which can be error-prone: the program is still memory-safe by construction, but it is not logically memory-safe, because an object access may reach the wrong object. In this work, we propose deferred borrows, which provide the type-safety benefits of borrows without the constraints on usage patterns that they otherwise impose. Deferred borrows work by encapsulating enough state at creation time to perform the actual borrow later, while statically guaranteeing that the eventual borrow will reach the same object it would have otherwise. The static guarantee is made with a path-dependent type tying the deferred borrow to the container (struct, vector, etc.) of the borrowed object. This combines the type-safety of borrowing with the flexibility of traditional pointers, while retaining logical memory-safety

Domestic Violence in the Workplace

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a pervasive problem that follows victims from the home into the workplace. Many women who experience violence in their homes are also harassed at work and are abused in the workplace. For the current study, thirty women who reported a history of workplace violence were recruited from a homeless women’s shelter. Of the participants, thirteen experienced domestic violence in the workplace, and this paper focuses on the results obtained from those thirteen respondents. This paper also discusses the link between poverty and homelessness, intimate partner violence, and workplace violence

Reading the Academic Library: an exploration of the conceived, perceived and lived spaces of the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull

Focusing on the perspectives of ‘library users’, this paper argues for a reconsideration of dominant conceptions of academic libraries as dusty repositories of books and restrictive study spaces. Using the Brynmor Jones Library (BJL) at the University of Hull as a case study and drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s concepts as of space as conceived, perceived and lived, it asks: How do library users experience library space(s) in the neoliberal university?Analysis of the research data has led to the identification of five themes that represent the different facets of academic library space: physical spaces, imagined spaces, social spaces, engagement spaces and discovery spaces. These themes challenge traditional definitions of libraries and redefine them from the perspective of those who use and work within them