Report on the Modern Greek Studies Association Conference,New York,October 13–15, 2011

The first part of the report, for October 13, describes a formal panel with presentations on Modern Greek library and bibliographic matters. It also describes the meeting of the Association's Library Committee. The second part of the report, for October 14–15, summarizes presentations at four scholarly panels in the fields of linguistics, history, emigration studies, and economics.     

Studies of the Publishing Industry’s Cultural Quality

Publishing belongs to the information content industry in essence, where “the content is the king, the brand brings success”. Whether the content of the publication is appealing, accessible, attractive and influential depends on its cultural content. That is why we pay special attention to the research on cultural quality in relation to online publishing technology and information systems transmission. This article presents an in-depth research on this issue from three aspects: why should the research on cultural quality be emphasized; how to understand culture and cultural quality; what are the principles and conditions to form the cultural quality.     

The Formation of Swedish Media Studies, 1960–1980

Around 1960, the politics of the emerging media society in Sweden tended to fixate the formative functions of mass communication. The monopoly of public service broadcast media, press subsidies and new tendencies in film policy were some of the issues around which uncertainty prevailed. New methods to provide reliable data were sought by politicians, since empirical facts were required as arguments for an updated media policy. This article examines the different ways that the field of media studies was introduced in Sweden between 1960 and 1980. We argue that Swedish academic media studies departed from, and emerged within, a rather diffuse borderland between industry, politics and academia. The formation of national media research in Sweden can partly be seen as an effect of politicians and the media industry wanting to be better informed on issues such as media influence, media ownership and the habits and composition of the media audience.     

Report on Modern Greek Studies Association Conference,Chicago, November 3–5, 2005

ABSTRACT

The author details library and archival panels related to Modern Greece held at the November 2005 biennial conference of the Modern Greek Studies Association (MGSA). He also summarizes several scholarly panels on linguistic and historical topics presented at this conference.     

Thinking Culture and Cultural Studies—from/of the Global South

ABSTRACT

This essay invites us to consider the need to rethink culture and some theoretical/intellectual assumptions in Cultural Studies when we bring up the issue of the “Global South.” The essay makes a case for “going South” in Cultural Studies. It advances a notion of the South that is based on a frame of dispossession. The first section offers a historical overview of the Global South and considers where the Global South is today. The second section attempts to rethink the notion of ‘culture’ and some intellectual orientations in Cultural Studies when we move to the Global South.     

Concerns about the Disproportionate Use of Economic Research in the FCC'S Media Ownership Studies from 2002–2007

An analysis of the studies used by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in its media ownership proceedings from 2002–2007 found a disproportionate use of economic research to support the agency's rule changes. The use of this research in policymaking is important because the FCC's reliance on economic literature may have helped justify a “procedural” definition of what constitutes the public interest, and a “neoliberal” faith in the wisdom of market forces to ensure that the public interest is being served. The findings suggest that the inclusion of a broader range of scholarship, especially media research, would not have supported the FCC's decision to further relax media ownership rules.     

Depository libraries,the Internet,and the 21st century?

The convergence of Internet technology and federal information policy are encouraging federal information producers and users to adopt a new direct model of information dissemination of federal information from producing agency to end user. On the surface, this trend would appear to remove the traditional middlemen—the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) and depository libraries—from the dissemination model. To assess the impact of the Internet model on the future viability of the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP), the traditional GPO/depository library model of information dissemination is examined in four areas, keeping in mind the underlying intent of the FDLP to assure access to federal information in all congressional districts.     

Change the Space,Change the Practice?

This paper explores the results of the introduction of the Pop-Up Newsroom, a virtual, temporary citizen journalism-style mobile news operation, to university student journalists. The results revealed two categories of response: those who embraced change and began to develop networked journalism identities; and those who advocated for the traditional brick-and-mortar newsroom and accompanying practices as preserving professional journalism identities.     

Slavic‐Related Pamphlets from the Communist Party USA's Reference Center for Marxist Studies

This article describes the nearly 1,000 Slavic‐related pamphlets acquired in 2006 by New York University's Tamiment Library from the Reference Center for Marxist Studies, which was the library of the Communist Party USA.     

Fighting the Prison–Industrial Complex: A Call to Communication and Cultural Studies Scholars to Change the World1

Collectively authored by the members of Prison Communication, Activism, Research, and Education (PCARE), an NCA-based group of scholars and activists, this essay argues that the prison–industrial complex has grown into a dire threat to the practices of US democracy. The essay “maps” the crises spawned by the prison–industrial complex and then offers a comprehensive action plan for pursuing new forms of scholarship, pedagogy, and activism. The essay therefore hopes to launch nothing less than a revolution in communication and cultural studies scholarship and a new wave of peace-and-justice activism.     

Annals of Library and Information Studies: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Journal and a Comparison with the Top Library and Information Studies Journals in Asia and Worldwide (2011–2017)

ABSTRACT

This article presents a thorough bibliometric analysis of research published in Annals of Library and Information Studies (ALIS), an India-based journal, for the period 2011–2017. Specifically, it compares this journal’s trends with those of other library and information science (LIS) journals from the same geographical area (India, and Asia as a whole) and with the 10 highest-rated LIS journals worldwide. The source of the data used was the multidisciplinary database Scopus. To perform this comparison, ALIS’ production was analyzed in order to identify authorship patterns; for example, authors’ countries of residence, co-authorship trends, and collaboration networks. Research topics were identified through keyword analysis, while performance was measured by examining the number of citations articles received. This study provides substantial information. The research lines detected through examining the keywords in ALIS articles were determined to be similar to those for the top LIS journals in both Asia and worldwide. Specifically, ALIS authors are focusing on metrics, bibliometrics, and social networking, which follows global trends. Notably, however, collaboration among Asia-based journals was found to be lower than that in the top-indexed journals in the LIS field, showing lesser internationalization. The results obtained present a roadmap for expanding the research in this field.     

The repository,the researcher,and the REF: “It's just compliance,compliance, compliance”

Although institutional repositories (IRs) have become widespread, they have been consistently under-populated and under-utilised. Unless their content approaches a significant percentage of a university's output, IRs can neither form a useful branch of open access to scholarly communications, nor provide a representative view of an institution's research output. The UK's 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF) requires all work submitted to it to have been deposited in a repository, which for most authors would mean an IR. This research sought to understand the impact of the REF mandate upon researchers and repository staff, and upon their relationship with the university, through a series of semi-structured interviews with researchers and repository managers. The research discovered that despite steep rises in repository submissions, little resource has been made available to accommodate hugely-increased workloads, nor have interfaces improved. Researchers and repository-managers alike struggle with a tedious and difficult administrative task that may require many iterations to complete. The research concludes that the mandate, and the pressure it places on the relationship between the researcher and the institution, is highlighting unspoken tensions in this relationship. Although the mandate is increasing the amount of open access material in the UK, as well as providing universities with evidence for the REF, it is placing significant strain on the tacit contract between a researcher and their employer. Opportunities to align the participants, to create alternative metrics from newly available data, and to develop new solutions, are being missed. This has implications for the way other mandates focusing on deposit in IRs are managed, both within and beyond the UK.     

Behind the Findings: Yes,the Science Explorations Program Worked,but Why?

Abstract The Science Explorations program was developed by the Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM) out of a desire to use the unique resources of MPM to advance informal science education and to address a community need of local and national concern: improving science education and accessibility for underserved audiences. In 2002, with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and private donors, MPM launched this after‐school program for a target group of urban, mostly minority, middle school girls, a group at risk for underachievement in science and technology. The museum staff built a combined program with five middle schools and also sought to reach out to family members of the participating girls in order to increase support for the young women's science endeavors. A three‐year evaluation of the Science Explorations program demonstrated positive findings from primarily quantitative data. An aim of this article is to present findings from the qualitative data to shed light on the reasons this program met nearly all of its targets. Findings from case studies and qualitative interviews suggest that the museum staff's efforts to demystify science—a process that provided ongoing access to real scientific endeavors and invited personal contact with scientists—influenced the program's success. Findings also suggest that strong school liaisons may help increase family support for young women's scientific pursuits, which can in turn play a role in their success in this program.     

Chinese Studies Librarianship in North America

Although American libraries had begun collecting Chinese language materials in the 19th century, notably the United States Library of Congress in 1869, Yale in 1878, Harvard in 1879, and Berkeley in 1896, East Asian studies librarianship in North America, including China studies librarianship, was not fully developed until the 1960s. There was no formal organization that represented the interest of Chinese studies librarians because there were few of them and most of them were China scholars rather than trained librarians. More than 100 years later, the number of Chinese studies librarians in North America has increased considerably, primarily in response to the demand in the field of China studies and more recently to the needs of immigrant population and the general public who has an interest in China.This paper traces the history and growth of Chinese studies librarianship in North America, documents the development of the professional organization that represents Chinese studies librarians, and exami.     

Liveness, “Reality,” and the Mediated Habitus from Television to the Mobile Phone

Television's liveness has long been seen as one of its key features. This paper argues that “liveness” is not a textual feature, but a more fundamental category (in Durkheim's sense) that contributes to underlying conceptions of how media are involved in social organization through their provision of privileged access to central social “realities.” This ideological view of liveness (cf. Jane Feuer's early work) is then extended in two ways: first, to consider two new forms of “liveness” that do not involve television (online liveness via the Internet and “group liveness” via the mobile phone); and second, by connecting liveness with Bourdieu's concept of habitus, and thereby linking “liveness” (including in its extended senses) with other parts of the materialized system of classification through which we make sense of the everyday world.     

“Serving the masses,not the classes”: Station WHN,pioneer of commercial broadcasting of the 1920s

Historical accounts of how American radio developed into an advertising medium in the 1920s have focused almost exclusively on the broadcasting activities of large corporate concerns, especially AT&T. The contributory role of small broadcasters to this process has been overlooked, despite the fact that many of these were operating on a commercial basis when their larger corporate competitors were still eschewing direct advertising as an abuse of the medium. Drawing on contemporary publications and archival sources, this article details the controversial career of one such commercial pioneer, station WHN of New York, which played a crucial and hitherto overlooked role in opening up the airwaves to commercial use.