The development of recordkeeping systems in the British Empire and Commonwealth, 1870s–1960s

¹ 1. Use of the term ‘recordkeeping’ should not be taken as an endorsement of the Records Continuum as elaborated by Frank Upward and his collaborators. View all notesThis essay demonstrates that initiatives in the imperial periphery, not least in Western Australia, played a significant role in the development of recordkeeping systems in the British Empire and Commonwealth. Local circumstances, including the adequacy of local revenues and the availability of skilled staff, played their part in shaping the systems. Nonetheless, there are overarching patterns. The need to maintain security provided a potent driver for the creation of confidential registries. The need to carry out basic functions influenced the design of recordkeeping systems far more than any shared ‘imperial imaginary’. The diverging work patterns of colonial capitals and of district administrations tended to produce distinct recordkeeping systems. The development of integrated registry systems may have played a part in the development of the Secretariat as an institution of colonial government.     

War Journalism and the “KIA Journalist”: The Cases of David Bloom and Michael Kelly

This paper examines mediated discourse around the deaths of two prominent journalists who died in the Iraq war in 2003: NBC reporter David Bloom and Washington Post columnist Michael Kelly. Their deaths are interpreted by journalists though narratives related to bravery, volunteerism, sacrifice, and witnessing. A discursive construct, labeled the “KIA journalist,” develops that situates the death of the war reporter within broader tropes connected to the normative journalistic role. Ultimately, Kelly and Bloom are placed in a framework that strives to increase journalism's cultural authority by positioning journalists as representations of the collective good.     

The Price and New Title Output of Scholarly Books: 2009–2016

The majority of scholars in the humanities and the social sciences, the scientific, technical, and medical, and the legal, tax, and regulatory fields are interested in the state of scholarly book publishing because these books often play a pivotal role in the often-opaque tenure, promotion, and grant application process. In the past, several studies analyzed new title output and scholarly book prices. However, no one investigated the impact of the Recession of 2007–2009 on scholarly books. This study looks at the impact of this recession, its impact on scholarly book prices and new title output between 2009 and 2016, and makes a series of recommendations for university presses.     

Arts Journalism And Its Packaging In France,Germany, The Netherlands And The United States, 1955–2005

In the second half of the twentieth century, the volume, content and appearance of arts journalism in Western daily newspapers have changed significantly in accordance with wider transformations in the arts and journalism. Previous studies have focused on (1) which culture receives attention, (2) the way culture gets attention, and (3) economic pressures underlying transformations. In this article we aim to bring these strands together by analyzing how changes in the packaging of arts journalism have evolved in relation to the cultural content which is discussed and the volume of (cultural) advertising that is featured in newspapers. We conduct a content analysis of the coverage given to both “highbrow” and “popular” art forms in French, German, Dutch and US elite newspapers for four sample years: 1955, 1975, 1995 and 2005. The results show that newspapers all seem to converge into a balance between news reporting and reviewing. We find evidence for an increased catering for the needs and interests of audiences in some aspects (e.g. more popular culture) but not in others (e.g. no more human interest). Finally, most newspapers show an increase in cultural advertising, although the European newspapers in our sample contain much less advertising than the American ones. A stronger presence of advertising is positively related to both a lifestyle orientation of newspapers and a focus on popular culture.     

The Future of Journalism—Who to Believe?

This work collates the opinions of European professionals and internet users concerning the changing reality facing the world of journalism following the explosion of digital media. Our research shows the results of analytical surveys conducted between October 2013 and January 2014 among 54 professionals of renowned prestige, and 500 regular users of the digital media in the five most populated countries in the European Union: Germany, United Kingdom, France, Italy and Spain, all states affected to a greater or lesser extent by the crisis of the printed press. The surveys cover a wide range of topics, from the impact of social networks, the quality of the digital media, the willingness of citizens to pay for content and the degree of interactivity in the digital media for the future of journalism. Professionals and users agree that the news in 2020 will be better and more interactive than now. With regard to other matters, there is more disagreement. Professionals are much more critical than users when it comes to evaluating the quality of the news. The professionals’ survey was more qualitative, and, in their opinion, overcoming the crisis in the written press implies, among other measures, promoting analysis, prioritising quality over quantity and offering “niche” specialisation.     

The Public Library and the Problem of Hospital Libraries for Patients–The Case of Israel

ABSTRACT

Providing information to the health consumer is one of the main tasks of our modern information society. This information falls into two categories: medical information, and supportive information such as literature and poetry. This article discusses the problematic situation of libraries and of information for patients in Israeli hospitals, and raises the question of the public library being a possible solution to help people in need get the information they are entitled to. The conclusions are based on a survey conducted in 1994. The results are rather disappointing: only 26.3% of the hospitals have library services for patients; most of them are managed by volunteers who have no training in professional librarianship. Also, in terms of book acquisition policy, library activities, and criteria for lending books, most of the results indicate that much needs to be done to improve the situation and help the health consumer receive information and support through the library. As it is clear that the situation in hospitals is not going to change in the near future, it is suggested that the public library serve as a helping resource outside the hospital and by that action it would not only contribute to society but expand its functions and strengthen its position in the community.     

Journalism and Critical Engagement: Naiveté, Embarrassment,and Intelligibility

This article explores the possibility of journalists acting as custodians of critical engagement, drawing on Rancière's conception of dissensus as organized disagreement over the conditions of understanding. It begins by assessing the status that worthiness and naiveté have as negative symbolic capital in the journalistic field, before asking whether journalists' ambivalent detachment from the objects of their inquiry hinders their ability to engage critically with experts in other fields. It argues that journalism's role in marshaling dissensus amounts to making clear the limits and absences of intelligibility in journalism and other fields, in distinction to disseminating knowledge as such.     

Government information of,by, and for the people The changing mission of the American Library Association's Public Documents Committee, 1876–1956

Even before the creation of the American Library Association's Government Documents Round Table (GODORT) in 1972, librarians had long distinguished themselves as champions of the people's right of access to government information. In particular, it was the American Library Association's Public Documents Committee, which, during its long tenure from 1876 to 1956, remained the premier organizational body through which the library profession sought to shape government information policies. While the commitment of members of the Public Documents Committee to the goal of open access to government information never wavered, the underlying sense of mission that guided the Committee's work underwent considerable evolution during its history. Whether as genteel reformers of the Gilded Age, patriotic popularizers of the 1920s, or university-oriented social engineers during the Great Depression, Public Documents Committee members crafted a government documents reform agenda that translated a recognizably modern objective into the social and intellectual idiom of the age in which they lived.     

The Zenith‐WJAZ case and the chaos of 1926–27

The straw that broke the camel's back of the Radio Act of 1912 with respect to broadcasting was the Zenith‐WJAZ case and the “chaos” that followed the overturning of the regulatory agency's authority by the court. This chaos, in the form of interference from stations frantically searching for a clear frequency, led to the greatly strengthened Radio Act of 1927 and to the present Communications Act of 1934. Marvin R. Bensman is assistant professor in the Department of Speech and Drama of Memphis State University, and earned his Ph.D. in 1969 from the University of Wisconsin.     

The Idea of the Comprehensive Research Collection,The Perils of “Linguistic Impoverishment,” and Print Publications in the Turkic Languages of the North Caucasus, 1806–2017 (Part I)

Publications in the Turkic languages of the North Caucasus (Kumyk, Karachai-Balkar, Nogai, and a few others) are intelligible to readers of Turkish, Tatar, Kazakh, and other more commonly taught Turkic languages, but have suffered from serious neglect as sources for Western scholarship and, concomitantly, as materials that Western libraries might want to acquire. This is largely due to three factors: a lack of awareness on the part of scholars and librarians that publications in these languages exist; a lack of awareness that these publications have scholarly value at least as high as that of publications commonly cited in scholarly works about Islam in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, etc.; and the difficulty (especially in the past) of acquiring materials in these languages via the established acquisitions networks of Western libraries. Part of a planned series of articles exploring the publication history of and bibliographic record for the languages of the North Caucasus, this article will use language family (e.g., Turkic) as the unit of analysis, rather than the ethnoterritorial units created during the Soviet period (i.e., Kabardino-Balkaria) or in earlier eras (i.e., Daghestan). More broadly, the (quite understandable) failure of Western libraries to amass comprehensive collections in the vernacular languages of the North Caucasus raises interesting questions regarding the nature and purpose of the contemporary research library, which will be explored as well.