‘I came like the thunder and I vanish like the wind’: exploring genre repertoire and document work in the Assemblea operai e studenti of 1969

This paper will examine a suite of documents generated within one Italian post-war social movement as a means to explore four assertions: (a) that the common practice of addressing the printed word generated by social movements primarily as bearers of linguistic and conceptual content (‘texts’) too often comes at the price of ignoring certain fundamental matters of which the materiality of these documents can inform us; (b) that, connected to this, the lenses of genre and genre repertoire offer important means of deepening our readings not only of the content of social movement documents, but also the broader context of their production and use; (c) used with care, understandings of genre, genre repertoire and the materiality of documents can likewise inform the efforts of those working—in the community, in the history and heritage professions, and at the intersection of all three—to preserve and manage such documents; (d) reflections upon genre, genre repertoire and the materiality of documents may also contribute to the ongoing development of a critical information studies.     

The Psychology of Delivering a Psychological Service: Self‐organised learning as a model for consultation

The article describes how one Educational Psychology Service in the UK developed a service delivery based on self‐organised learning (SOL). This model is linked to the paradigms and discourses within which educational psychology and special educational needs work.

The work described here is dedicated to the memory of Brian Roberts, academic, close friend of Steve and a source of inspiration to both the authors.     

Precision prediction based on ranked list coherence

We introduce a statistical measure of the coherence of a list of documents called the clarity score. Starting with a document list ranked by the query-likelihood retrieval model, we demonstrate the score's relationship to query ambiguity with respect to the collection. We also show that the clarity score is correlated with the average precision of a query and lay the groundwork for useful predictions by discussing a method of setting decision thresholds automatically. We then show that passage-based clarity scores correlate with average-precision measures of ranked lists of passages, where a passage is judged relevant if it contains correct answer text, which extends the basic method to passage-based systems. Next, we introduce variants of document-based clarity scores to improve the robustness, applicability, and predictive ability of clarity scores. In particular, we introduce the ranked list clarity score that can be computed with only a ranked list of documents, and the weighted clarity score where query terms contribute more than other terms. Finally, we show an approach to predicting queries that perform poorly on query expansion that uses techniques expanding on the ideas presented earlier.

Users or Supporters? Understanding Motivations and Behaviors of Museum Members

Research into museum membership schemes and their members is limited and fragmented. This study presents an overview of existing research as a contextual framework for a study of the motivations and behavior of members of a British national museum. The paper examines factors such as members' motives for joining, their usage of benefits, the value they place on membership, and their feelings about the host organization. It concludes with advice as to how membership managers can more effectively manage their own membership organization.