We are archivists, but are we OK?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to show that the digital environment of the early twenty-first century is forcing the information sciences to revisit practices and precepts built around paper and physical objects over centuries. The training of archivists, records managers, librarians and museum curators has had to accommodate this new reality. Often the response has been to superimpose a digital overlay on existing curricula. A few have taken a radical approach by scrutinising the fundamentals of the professions and the ontologies of the materials they handle. Design/methodology/approach – The article explores a wide range of the issues exposed by this critique through critical analysis of ideas and published literature. Findings – The authors challenge archive and records management educators to align their curricula with contemporary need and to recognise that partnership with other professionals, particularly in the area of technology, is essential. Practical implications – The present generation owe it to future generations of archivists and records managers to ensure that the education that they get to prepare them for professional life is forward-looking in the same way. Originality/value – This paper aims to raise awareness of the educational needs of twenty-first century archives and records professionals

An H alpha Survey of 8 Abell Clusters: the dependence of tidally-induced star formation on cluster density

We have undertaken a survey of H alpha emission in a substantially complete sample of CGCG galaxies of types Sa and later within 1.5 Abell radii of the centres of 8 low-redshift Abell clusters. Some 320 galaxies were surveyed, of which 116 were detected in emission (39% of spirals, 75% of peculiars). Detected emission was classified as `compact' or `diffuse'. From an analysis of the full survey sample, we reconfirm our previous identification of compact and diffuse emission with circumnuclear starburst and disk emission respectively. The circumnuclear emission is associated either with the presence of a bar, or with a disturbed galaxy morphology indicative of on-going tidal interactions. The frequency of such tidally-induced (circumnuclear) starburst emission in spirals increases from regions of lower to higher local galaxy surface density, and from clusters with lower to higher central galaxy space density. We conclude that tidal interactions are likely to be the main mechanism for the transformation of spirals to S0s in clusters. Finally, for regions of comparable local density, the frequency of tidally-induced starburst emission is greater in clusters with higher central galaxy density. This implies that, for a given local density, morphological transformation of disk galaxies proceeds more rapidly in clusters of higher central galaxy density. This effect is considered to be due to subcluster merging and could account for the previously considered anomalous absence of a significant type - local surface density relation for irregular clusters at intermediate redshift.Comment: 22 pages including 4 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRA

Design considerations for a space database

Part of the information used in a real-time simulator is stored in the visual database. This information is processed by an image generator and displayed as a real-time visual image. The database must be constructed in a specific format, and it should efficiently utilize the capacities of the image generator that is was created for. A visual simulation is crucially dependent upon the success with which the database provides visual cues and recognizable scenes. For this reason, more and more attention is being paid to the art and science of creating effective real-time visual databases. Investigated here are the database design considerations required for a space-oriented real-time simulator. Space applications often require unique designs that correspond closely to the particular image-generator hardware and visual-database-management software. Specific examples from the databases constructed for NASA and its Evans and Sutherland CT6 image generator illustrate the various design strategies used in a space-simulation environment. These database design considerations are essential for all who would create a space database

Libre culture: meditations on free culture

Libre Culture is the essential expression of the free culture/copyleft movement. This anthology, brought together here for the first time, represents the early groundwork of Libre Society thought. Referring to the development of creativity and ideas, capital works to hoard and privatize the knowledge and meaning of what is created. Expression becomes monopolized, secured within an artificial market-scarcity enclave and finally presented as a novelty on the culture industry in order to benefit cloistered profit motives. In the way that physical resources such as forests or public services are free, Libre Culture argues for the freeing up of human ideas and expression from copyright bulwarks in all forms

Gaugino condensation in an improved heterotic M-theory

Gaugino condensation is discussed in the context of a consistent new version of low energy heterotic M-theory. The four dimensional reduction of the theory is described, based on simple boson and fermion backgrounds. This is generalised to include gaugino condenstates and various background fluxes, some with non-trivial topology. It is found that condensate and quantised flux contributions to the four-dimensional superpotential contain no corrections due to the warping of the higher dimensional metric.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, LaTe

Privileging information is inevitable

Libraries, archives and museums have long collected physical materials and other artefacts. In so doing they have established formal or informal policies defining what they will (and will not) collect. We argue that these activities by their very nature privilege some information over others and that the appraisal that underlies this privileging is itself socially constructed. We do not cast this in a post-modernist or negative light, but regard a clear understanding of it as fact and its consequences as crucial to understanding what collections are and what the implications are for the digital world. We will argue that in the digital world it is much easier for users to construct their own collections from a combination of resources, some privileged and curated by information professionals and some privileged by criteria that include the frequency with which other people link to and access them. We conclude that developing these ideas is an important part of placing the concept of a digital or hybrid paper/digital library on a firm foundation and that information professionals need to learn from each other, adopting elements of a variety of different approaches to describing and exposing information. A failure to do this will serve to push information professional towards the margins of the information seekers perspective

Beltway: Getting Around Garbage Collection Gridlock

We present the design and implementation of a new garbage collection framework that significantly generalizes existing copying collectors. The Beltway framework exploits and separates object age and incrementality. It groups objects in one or more increments on queues called belts, collects belts independently, and collects increments on a belt in first-in-first-out order. We show that Beltway configurations, selected by command line options, act and perform the same as semi-space, generational, and older-first collectors, and encompass all previous copying collectors of which we are aware. The increasing reliance on garbage collected languages such as Java requires that the collector perform well. We show that the generality of Beltway enables us to design and implement new collectors that are robust to variations in heap size and improve total execution time over the best generational copying collectors of which we are aware by up to 40%, and on average by 5 to 10%, for small to moderate heap sizes. New garbage collection algorithms are rare, and yet we define not just one, but a new family of collectors that subsumes previous work. This generality enables us to explore a larger design space and build better collectors

The relationship between apamin binding and channel block in KCa2 potassium channels.

Small conductance calcium-activated potassium channels (KCa2.1,2.2,2.3) are widely distributed throughout the body and are involved in diverse physiological processes including the regulation of neuronal firing and smooth muscle contraction. They are also potential targets in the treatment of cardiac arrhythmia. The KCa2.2 and 2.3 members of the family are blocked by the peptide toxin apamin at low concentrations, however, the mechanism of block by apamin is unclear. In electrophysiological experiments apamin has been reported to block Kca2.2 and 2.3 with IC50 ~100 pM and ~1nM respectively. In contrast, in ligand binding experiments using [125I]-mono-iodoapamin it has been found that apamin does not discriminate between Kca2.2 and 2.3 and that it binds with significantly higher affinity ( ~5pM). This discrepancy has led to the suggestion that, rather than acting as a classical pore blocker, apamin exerts its action by an allosteric mechanism. It is notable that the ligand binding studies reported so far have been conducted with isolated cell membranes in non-physiological solution with low ionic strength. We have investigated this discrepancy between results from ligand binding and electrophysiological studies by comparing binding of [125I]-mono-iodoapamin and inhibition of KCa2 current in intact HEK 293 cells using identical physiological solutions. In these conditions we found that apamin bound to KCa2.1 and KCa 2.3 with KL 60 and 606 pM, close to values of IC50 from electrophysiological experiments. We also compared the ability of some known SK channel blockers, UCL 1848, UCL 1684, gallamine and dequalinium, to displace labelled apamin and inhibit KCa2 current. With these compounds we found a good correlation between K¬i and IC50. These findings suggest that the discrepancy between binding and block might arise from differences in the experimental protocols used. To examine this we examined apamin block of KCa2 current in low ionic strength solutions in which NaCl was iso-osmotically replaced by sucrose. In these conditions 100 pM apamin caused 92 ± 0.1 % block as against 51 ± 5 % block in physiological ionic strength. We conclude that binding data obtained from membrane preparations must be interpreted with care when making comparisons with data from functional experiments and that this has implications for current views on the mechanism of action of apamin as an SK channel blocke