Book Reviews

Zuckerman: Scientist Extraordinary by Bernard Donovan BioScientifica, Bristol, 2005, 555pp. ISBN 1‐901978249 £24.95 Negotiating licences for digital resources by Fiona Durrant Facet Publishing, 2006, ISBN 1 85604 586 2 Metadata for Information Management and Retrieval By David Haynes Facet Publishing, 2004, ISBN 1 85604 4890     

The cultural value of heritage: evidence from the Heritage Lottery Fund

The Heritage Lottery Fund has, over the past 13 years, given £4billion to heritage projects of all kinds. As the Fund has matured a greater emphasis has been placed on the evaluation of the social and economic outcomes of this funding. In 2004 we reported on progress with evaluation of the programmes targeted at particular types of heritage (Clark, 2004 Clark, K. 2004. Why fund heritage? The role of research in the Heritage Lottery Fund. Cultural Trends, 52: 65–85.  [Google Scholar]). The greater challenge has been to evaluate the outcomes from the Fund's generic programmes, which can fund any type of heritage and which between them account for over two-thirds of total funding. This article reviews the Fund's experience over the last 3 years in developing and implementing an evaluation system using the Public (or Cultural) Value framework. It presents some initial results from the research so far completed and reviews how far the framework has been useful in suggesting research priorities and organizing findings.     

Being ‘nice’ or being ‘normal’: girls resisting discourses of ‘coolness’

In this paper we consider discourses of friendship and belonging mobilised by girls who are not part of the dominant ‘cool’ group in one English primary school. We explore how, by investing in alternative and, at times, resistant, discourses of ‘being nice’ and ‘being normal’ these ‘non-cool’ girls were able to avoid some of the struggles for dominance and related bullying and exclusion found by us and other researchers to be a feature of ‘cool girls’ groupings. We argue that there are multiple dynamics in girls' lives in which being ‘cool’ is only sometimes a dominant concern. There are some children for whom explicitly positioning themselves outside of the ‘cool’ group is both resistant and protective, providing a counter-discourse to the dominance of ‘coolness’. In this paper, which is based on observational and interview data in one school in the south of England, we focus on two main groupings of intermediate and lower status girls, as well as on one ‘wannabe’ ‘cool girl’. While belonging to a lower status group can bring disadvantages for the girls we studied, there were also benefits.