The role of disinterestedness in Kant's aesthetics

This thesis assesses the role of disinterestedness in Kant's aesthetics, and how Kant analyses disinterested pleasure which he takes to ground the judgment of taste. The thesis considers what are the conditions of a genuine judgment of taste and assesses how Kant uses those conditions to distinguish judgments of beauty from other judgments. In chapter 2 and chapter 7, Kant's distinction between free and dependent beauty is analysed, and in both chapters it is argued that the notion of dependent beauty is not coherent. In chapter 3, Kant's definitions of interest in the Critique of Judgment are assessed and found to be inadequate. In chapter 4, dispositions that are deemed by Kant to be inappropriate to the grounds of the proper judgment of taste are assessed. In chapter 5, Kant's attempt to distinguish the agreeable from the beautiful is considered, and found to be unsuccessful. Chapter 6 considers the role of necessity in attempting to circumvent that third objection, and the view that the "aesthetic ought" serves as an effective means of answering the first and second objections. Chapter 7 argues that the notion of aesthetic ideas is not coherent and so cannot serve to account for the spiritual need we have in the beautiful, it cannot figure in an account of why we should acquire taste. Chapter 8 casts doubt on the extent to which a desire to have our spiritual needs met in art and nature can account for our interest in them

Repository as a service (RaaS)

In his oft-quoted seminal paper ‘Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure For Scholarship In The Digital Age’ Clifford Lynch (2003) described the Institutional Repository as “a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members.” This paper seeks instead to define the repository service at a more primitive level, without the specialism of being an ‘Institutional Repository’, and looks at how it can viewed as providing a service within appropriate boundaries, and what that could mean for the future development of repositories, our expectations of what repositories should be, and how they could fit into the set of services required to deliver an Institutional Repository service as describe by Lynch.<br/

Using OAI-PMH and METS for exporting metadata and digital objects between repositories

Purpose: To examine the relationship between deposit of electronic theses in institutional and archival repositories. Specifically the paper considers the automated export of theses for deposit in the archival repository in continuation of the existing arrangement in Wales for paper-based theses. Design/methodology/approach: We present a description of software that makes use of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) as the first stage in the automatic import and ingest of items between institutional and archival repositories. The implications of this approach on the management of the institutional repository are also considered. Findings: We show that OAI-PMH is a useful approach to harvesting the metadata for items to be imported into an archival repository. This reduces the difficulty of maintenance of the import and export software components albeit at the possible expense of necessitating certain requirements on the management of the institutional repository. Research implications/limitations: The research shows that institutions can make use of OAI-PMH as a part of an automated export/import process, encouraging the preservation of multiple copies of digital items for increased safety of the content. Practical implications: The software has been developed and is being tested. It is proving capable of performing the required harvesting but the relative imprecision of searching in OAI-PMH has implications for the management of the exporting repository. These are discussed. Originality/value: We present a description and discussion of novel software components that enable the use of OAI-PMH as the first stage in the export and import of digital items between repositories, independently (as far as is practicable) of the software used by the repositories themselves

The DSpace Course - Item Submission Workflows

This module will introduce the item submission workflows available in DSpace. Workflows allow submissions to be checked before entering the repository. Submissions may be checked for accuracy, in order to improve the metadata, or simply to decide if they are OK to be archived. The module will show the three workflow steps available in DSpace, along with details about adding, changing and removing them from the submission process of collections.This course was created by the Repositories Support Project (http://www.rsp.ac.uk/) and was funded by JISC (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/