An MMB Special: Survey of Broadcasting Texts Compared

Harrison B. Summers, Robert E. Summers, and John H. Pennybacker, Broadcasting and the Public (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1978—$13.95)

Giraud Chester, Garnet R. Garrison, and Edgar E. Willis, Television and Radio (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, l978—price not given)

Saundra Hybels and Dana Ulloth, Broadcasting: An Introduction to Radio and Television (New York: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1978— price not given)     

Popular Illustration

Jim Kalett People and Crowds: A Photographic Album for Artists and Designers (New York: Dover Publications, 1978—$5.00, paper)

W.H. Hutchinson The World, The Work & the West of W.H.D. Koerner (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978—$35.00)

Philippe Garner, ed. The Encyclopedia of Decorative Arts: 1890-1940 (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1979—$35.00)

Colin Naylor and Genesis P-Orridge, eds. Contemporary Artists (London: St. James Press/New York: St. Martin's Press, 1977—E25.00/$50.00)     

Commonwealth Media

Television, Censorship and the Law, by Colin R. Munro (208 pp.---$22.00)

Characteristics of Local Media Audiences, by Ray Brown (130 pp.---$23.00)

Newspapers as Organizations, by Lars Engwall (288 pp.---$29.0O)

Broadcasting and Youth (London: Calouste Gulbenian Foundation, 98 Portland Place, London W1N 4ET, 1979---£1.70 or about $4.00, paper)

Carl Gardner, ed. Media, Politics & Culture: A Socialist View (London: Macmillan/Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanties Press, 1979---$21.50/9.75)

Asa Briggs, Governing the BBC (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1979---£10.00 or about $22.00)

Graham Cleverley's The Kettering Standoff: A Study of a Strike (Southhamption: Aeropagus, 1978---price not given, but available in hardback and paper)

Paul Hoch's The Newspaper Game: The Political Sociology of the Press (London and New York: Marian Boyars Ltd., 1974, released US in 1979---$10.00)

Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC Information Services, Ottawa, Ontario K1A ON2, Canada---available free on request, paper)

Australia: Henry Mayer tells us of nine recent publications on page     

Popular Culture (Frank Oglesbee)

Randall P. Harrison, The Cartoon: Communication to the Quick (Beverly Hills: SAGE Publications, SAGE ComnText series, 1982, 14.00 cloth, 6.95 pb)

John Caldwell Mug Shots (21 Central Ave., Albany, NY 12210: Fantaco enterprises, 1980, 2.95 pb, unpaginated),

Jan Harold Brunvand The Vanishing_Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings (NY: W.W. Norton, 1981, 208 pp., 14.95 cloth)

Richard Lipsky How We Play the Game: Why Sports Dominate American Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981, 189 pp., 7.25, pb)

Alan Gowans Learning to See: Historical Perspectives on Modern Popular Commercial Arts (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1981, 22.95 cloth, 13.95 pb, 514 pp.)     

Barriers to resource sharing among higher education libraries a report to the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP)

This paper describes the user-focused approach to information skills at MMU Library. It covers the following cycle: identifying training needs at three levels (organisation, group and individual); developing a training strategy and materials; marketing information skills within MMU. Specifically, it describes how we went about discovering what our users wanted, creating and delivering what they needed, and how we ‘sold’ it back to them.     

Take a Paws: Fostering Student Wellness with a Therapy Dog Program at Your University Library

Therapy dogs are trained and socialized to provide comfort to individuals who are ill or experiencing stress. The following article explores therapy dog outreach programs in academic libraries by describing a successful venture at McGill University Library. Background, planning advice, assessment results, and recommendations are presented with an aim to inform those who would like to implement similar programs at their libraries.     

Methodological individualism,educational administration,and leadership

There are two major categories of explanation for organisational performance: structural and individual. With the shift away from systems-theoretic accounts that occurred in the 1980s, structural explanations have been replaced increasingly by the individualism of leadership and leader-centric explanations, especially when it comes to schools. In this paper, we argue that leader-centric accounts involve a commitment to methodological individualism and that there are four serious problems with this view. First, it is logically difficult to describe individual actions without recourse to structures. Second, methodological individualism fosters a centralised mindset inviting the attribution of leadership where none may exist. Third, evidence for distributed cognition compromises leader-centrism. And fourth, administrative tasks themselves are often highly structured. In response to these problems, we urge a more balanced approach to organisational functioning, one that involves both structures and individuals.     

Studying Headteachers' Professional Lives: Getting the life history

In order to obtain a better understanding of how headteachers frame their professional lives, a comparative project was set up with a life history approach. A series of open-ended interviews were conducted where headteachers talked about themselves, their work, background, experiences and career. The article focuses on the modes of inquiry used in the study and explores alternative approaches to analysis, especially of content and form. Several methodological issues are discussed, for instance the production of data as an interactive and collaborative process of creating meaning, the central role of the research relations, dialogical analysis and how to move from separate individual stories to an analysis of headteachers' lives across different countries. As the analysis has unfolded, new questions have been posed about the comparative aspect of the project. At the beginning, cross-national similarities and differences were relatively straightforward and were found in the content of interviews. Since then, explorations of the form and structure of the stories have raised more complex juxtapositions. More recently, new questions have begun to emerge, such as about the nature and meanings of 'professional confidence' and its relationship to external accountability in national contexts.     

THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN

Silence needs to be shown to be taught. This is because the nonverbal, which is a different way of referencing the world than symbols, cannot be translated into words. Teaching silence is of special importance today because of the connection between silence and the creation of existential meaning, as well as the functioning of the creative process itself. The loss of silence in our culture will result in the loss of religious meaning and the impairment of creativity. Without deep meaning and the creative process the human species is at risk.