Journal articles on the topic 'Community college libraries Academic libraries Library use studies Libraries and students'

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe how the Hudson County Community College Library hosted a Super Smash Bros. for Wii U Tournament as part of its Fall 2015 and Spring 2016 programming, and discuss what it learned from hosting the event. Design/methodology/approach This paper details how a community college library planned, hosted and learned from its experience running a Super Smash Bros. for the Wii U Tournament. It will also describe how the library continued to use this experience to plan additional video game-based programming. Findings The Super Smash Bros. for the Wii U Tournament was generally well received by student attendees. However, student feedback revealed a preference for less-competitive “friendly” events instead of tournaments. Students also requested the option of having several games available instead of one. Originality/value Thus far, there has been little research on academic or community college libraries organizing video game-based programming and activities event. There have also been few studies about whether gaming events work better in libraries as tournaments or “free play” activities.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to seek to ascertain how many electronic resource troubleshooting LibGuides are in use and what level of support they tend to provide. LibGuides have become quite popular in academic libraries as a tool for subject and college liaison librarians to deliver library-mediated content to colleges and individual classes. Another promising area for their use is to provide electronic resource troubleshooting support to students and faculty, as well as to other library staff. Design/methodology/approach – A sample of electronic resource troubleshooting LibGuides was obtained through a Google advanced search augmented by additional searches in the limited LibGuides community search utility. These LibGuides were selected according to a standard definition of troubleshooting and were analyzed for content on 36 support variables. Findings – A relatively small number of LibGuides were located, and a thorough treatment of electronic resource access issues was present in only a limited number of the LibGuides found. Research limitations/implications – While some LibGuides may have gone undiscovered owing to an incomplete search strategy for discovery, subsequent efforts to find overlooked pages were mostly fruitless. The relatively small number of electronic resource troubleshooting LibGuides discovered coupled with their simplicity may indicate that the use of LibGuides platform in this capacity has not gained traction. Originality/value – While there have been many case studies discussing the use of LibGuides as a subject and course guide platform, relatively few have explored the use of LibGuides outside of their traditional subject-focused implementation, and none have looked at LibGuides as a potential platform to aid in electronic resource access troubleshooting.

A review of:
 Rowland, Ian, David Nicholas, Hamid R. Jamali, and Paul Huntington. “What do Faculty and Students Really Think about E-books?” Aslib Proceedings: New Information Perspectives; 59.6 (2007): 489-511.
 
 Objective – To assess academic users’ awareness, perceptions and levels of use of e-books. Also to discover the purposes for which e-books were used and identify the most effective library marketing strategies for e-books.
 
 Design – Survey.
 
 Setting – University College London (UCL).
 
 Subjects – 1,818 UCL staff and students.
 
 Methods – In November 2006, staff and students of UCL were asked to participate in an online survey, administered using SurveyMonkey software. The survey ran November 1-18, 2006. Survey results were analysed using Software Package for Social Sciences (SPSS).
 
 Main Results – The response rate to the survey was at least 6.7%. A total of 1,818 completed surveys were received from approximately 27,000 potential respondents, although it is not known whether all e-mails announcing the survey were successfully delivered. No statistically significant differences were found between the demographic profile of the survey sample and the profile of the total UCL population. Data regarding e-book usage were collected from the sub-group of respondents who were existing e-book users, and data regarding use of print collections and book discovery were collected from all respondents.
 
 Forty-four per cent of respondents had used e-books, with age a good predictor of usage. However additional data analysis revealed complex demographic interactions underlying e-book usage, making broad generalisations too simplistic. Of existing e-book users, 61% sourced e-books independently of the UCL library. Deeper analysis showed that men were more “library independent” than women and doctoral students were more so than other students and staff. Forty-eight per cent of existing e-book users preferred reading from a screen rather than paper, with men more likely to read from a screen than women, and undergraduates more likely to do so than other groups. Responses to questions about the purpose of reading showed that existing e-book users consulted e-books primarily for work and study, and tended to obtain these from libraries. They were less likely to use e-books for leisure, but if they did so, were likely to obtain them from non-library sources.
 
 E-books were compared to traditional print across a range of factors and scored very favourably for ease of copying, currency, space requirements, 24/7 accessibility, convenience and ease of navigation. However e-books scored poorly compared to print for ease of reading, ease of marking a place and ease of annotation. 
 
 Regarding use of library print titles, data from all respondents indicated that women (42%) were more likely to be regular users of print than men (35%). Print book discovery behaviour is complex, and age, gender and subject area all influenced book discovery preferences. Analysis of data regarding satisfaction with UCL’s current provision of print library books showed that 41% rated this service as “excellent” or “good,” but further analysis by gender, age and subject area revealed pockets of low satisfaction which warrant further attention.
 
 Students were much more aware of e-book availability through the UCL library than academic and research staff, with differences in awareness also displayed between different faculties. The library’s Web site and catalogue were the main channels for e-book awareness, with respondents themselves suggesting the library Web site and e-mail user guides as the most effective e-book awareness mechanisms.
 
 Conclusion – This study reveals a significant level of interest in and use of e-books in one academic community, but with differences determined by age, gender, academic sub-group and subject area. It builds on the findings of previous studies of e-book usage and indicates key areas for further study. These include whether real-life information behaviour correlates with the self-reporting of respondents, and the intersection of gender and self-reported information behaviour. This information, plus the patterns of book discovery behaviour emerging from this study, will be of interest to publishers, booksellers and libraries.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to answer the questions: What challenges do students face in an information commons and how does roving reference help?. Design/methodology/approach The author recounts her work roving in her community college information commons and supplements this with an analysis of 1,500 records from her detailed reference log that compares roving reference results with conventional references and with reference questions as a whole. Findings Her autoethnography and data reveal that roving substantially increases the number of reference encounters. In addition, her data sheds light on students’ struggles with common, productivity software, academic packages and malfunctioning hardware. More importantly, these findings show that roving reference data identify problems that librarians, as stakeholders, can solve. Research limitations/implications Roving reference in a community college information commons brings students in one library into sharper focus. Roving reference increases the number of reference encounters and the reach of reference service. It also exposes a use-based digital divide that calls for collaboration in the long run and increased point-of-need service immediately. Practical implications Even data that points to digital divides, hardware issues or other shortcomings and offers empirical evidence of problems for which library staff, unlike student workers, can find long-term solutions. This study shows that it is possible to gather rich and extensive data with minimal personnel and off-the-shelf software. Social implications A college degree is vital to social mobility and easing inequality. Fluency with academic technology and information is necessary for completing college. Roving reference means more opportunities to teach information and computer fluency at point of need and more opportunities for librarian stakeholders to find and remove obstacles to student learning. Originality/value This is one of the few, recent studies, autoethnographic or otherwise, on roving reference in a community college library’s information commons.

A Review of:
 Albarillo, F. (2018). Super-diversity and foreign-born students in academic libraries: A survey study. portal: Libraries and the Academy, 18(1), 59-91. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2018.0004
 Abstract
 Objective – To evaluate the relationship between academic and public library usage and various characteristics of foreign-born students.
 Design – Survey questionnaire.
 Setting – Medium-sized public liberal arts college in the northeastern United States.
 Subjects – 123 foreign-born students enrolled at the institution in fall 2014.
 Methods – The researcher emailed a five-part survey to participants who indicated on a screening survey that they were foreign-born students currently enrolled at the college. Of the participants emailed, 94 completed the survey. The survey used a super-diversity lens to assess academic and public library use by foreign-born students in relationship to multiple variables, including student status, race and ethnicity, immigration status, first-generation student status, gender, age, age of arrival in the United States (US), years living in the US, and ZIP Code (used to approximate median income based on the US Census Bureau’s 2014 American Community Survey). Respondents reported frequency of use on a Likert-type scale of 1=Never to 6=Always. The author adapted items from the In Library Use Survey Instrument (University of Washington Libraries, 2011). Usage types included: computer, Wi-Fi, staff assistance, electronic resources, physical resources, printing/scanning/photocopying, program attendance, and physical space. Independent sample t-tests were used to evaluate mean differences in reported library usage based on demographic variables. The author used Somers’ d statistical tests to explore the relationship between library use and age, age on arrival in the US, years lived in the US, and median income. The survey asked participants to describe both academic and public libraries in five words. To show term frequency, the author used word clouds as a visualization technique.
 Main Results – The study reported on the results of the library use survey section. Overall, foreign-born students used college libraries more frequently than public libraries. The author reported on findings that were statistically significant (p ≤ 0.5), focusing on those with mean differences ≥ 0.5. Key findings included: undergraduate students used public libraries and Wi-Fi/e-resources onsite at college libraries more often than graduate students; first-generation students gathered at the library with friends more frequently; no significant difference was reported in library resource use by gender; and non-white students used the college library more frequently as a study space and for printing. The author was surprised no significant differences in usage were found between participants with permanent vs. temporary immigration status. Somers’ d associations showed an inverse relationship between age and Wi-Fi use and age of arrival in the United States and likelihood of eating in the library. Overall, both library types were positively described in open-ended responses as places with social and academic value.
 Conclusion – The author suggested the concept of super-diversity equips librarians with a more inclusive approach to studying library user perspectives and behaviors. The author used survey data and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Diversity Standards (2012) to highlight library service considerations for foreign-born students. Examples of suggested service improvements included supporting printing in Unicode non-English fonts, cultivating a diverse library staff, and providing culturally appropriate library orientations and outreach. The author recommended that more research with foreign-born students was needed to assess culturally appropriate areas for eating and socializing, unique information needs, and expectations and awareness of library services. The author suggested first-generation students’ use of the library for socializing and non-white students’ higher use of libraries for studying as two areas for further qualitative study. The author also suggested creating services and partnerships between public and academic libraries could support foreign-born students, even recommending cross-training of library staff.

This study analyses the status of electronic resources facilities and services provided by the Engineering Colleges in Chennai. It also discusses the purpose of using e-resources, benefits, subject coverage, students satisfaction, problems that are faced by the Engineering College students while accessing e-resources .The study was limited to only four engineering colleges situated on the line to OMR road, Chennai. Majority of the students are accessing the e-resources from their Central Library followed by their home (17%), Internet centre (13%) and from their department libraries (10%). Since the student community has to depend on the e-resources for their academic endeavour, the libraries should subscribe the e-resources as per the required norms to fulfill the academic needs of the student community.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to determine the information literacy skills and needs of incoming and current transfer students. Design/methodology/approach Three studies are discussed, two of which were generated from ACRL’s Assessment in Action program. In the first, incoming transfer students were asked basic demographic questions and were tested on several basic information literacy skills. A combination of quantitative analysis and rubrics was used to assess results. A pre-test, post-test method was used in a basic introduction to campus life course for transfer students. Finally, the 2014 cohort of transfer student were resurveyed to test research skills and report interactions they had with reference librarians and library instruction during the previous year. Findings Initial observations suggested older transfer students, and students transferring from community colleges were least knowledgeable about basic information literacy concepts, and that students who had attended library instruction sessions were more knowledgeable. In the pre-test, intervention and post-test study, students did not show significant improvements in knowledge, but did show a significantly improved comfort level with library research. In the follow-up survey, second year transfer students who had library instruction during the previous year were significantly more likely to have sought out their subject liaison for consultations. Originality/value Research studies that focus on the information literacy needs and skills of transfer students and adult learners is somewhat scarce, compared to that of incoming freshmen. It is of use to both academic librarians in institutions that accept incoming transfer students, and to community college librarians who may be designing handoff library instruction.

A Review of:
 Mbabu, L.G., Bertram, A. B., & Varnum, K. (2013). Patterns of undergraduates’ use of scholarly databases in a large research university. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 39(2), 189-193. http://dx.doi.org/10.10.1016/j.acalib.2012.10.004
 
 Abstract
 
 Objective – To investigate undergraduate students’ patterns of electronic database use to discover whether database use increases as undergraduate students progress into later stages of study with increasingly sophisticated information needs and demands.
 
 Design – User database authentication log analysis.
 
 Setting – A large research university in the Midwestern United States of America.
 
 Subjects – A total of 26,208 undergraduate students enrolled during the Fall 2009 academic semester.
 
 Methods – The researchers obtained logs of user-authenticated activity from the university’s databases. Logged data for each user included: the user’s action and details of that action (including database searches), the time of action, the user’s relationship to the university, the individual school in which the user was enrolled, and the user’s class standing. The data were analyzed to determine which proportion of undergraduate students accessed the library’s electronic databases. The study reports that the logged data accounted for 61% of all database activity, and the authors suggest the other 39% of use is likely from “non-undergraduate members of the research community within the [university’s] campus IP range” (192).
 
 Main Results – The study found that 10,897 (42%) of the subject population of undergraduate students accessed the library’s electronic databases. The study also compared database access by class standing, and found that freshman undergraduates had the highest proportion of database use, with 56% of enrolled freshman accessing the library’s databases. Sophomores had the second highest proportion of students accessing the databases at 40%; juniors and seniors had the lowest percentage of use, with 38% of enrolled students at each level accessing the library’s databases. The study also found that November was the peak of database search activity, accounting for 37% of database searches for the Fall 2009 semester. Database use varied by the schools or colleges in which students were enrolled, with the School of Nursing having the highest percentage of enrolled undergraduates using library databases (54%). The authors also report that the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts had the fourth highest proportion of users at 46%, representing 7,523 unique students, more than double the combined number of undergraduate users from all other programs. Since the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts accounts for more than 60% of the total undergraduate enrollment, the authors suggest that information literacy instruction targeted to these programs would have the greatest campus-wide impact.
 
 Conclusion – Although the library conducts a number of library instruction sessions with freshman students each Fall semester, the authors conclude that database use patterns suggest that the proportion of students who continue to use library databases decreases as level of study progresses. This finding does not support the study’s hypothesis that database use increases as students advance through their undergraduate studies.

A Review of:
 Ciszek, M. P. (2011). Out on the web: The relationship between campus climate and GLBT-related web-based resources in academic libraries. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 37(5), 430-436. doi: 10.1016/j.acalib.2011.06.007 
 
 Objective – To explore whether academic institutions that score highly on the LGBT-Friendly Campus Climate Index also have well-developed Web-based library resources to support GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender) students. 
 
 Design – Website analysis, percentage, and binary logistic regression analysis. 
 
 Setting – Library websites of colleges and universities in four American geographic regions: Northeast, Midwest, South, and West.
 
 Subjects – There were 259 colleges and universities that participated in the 2010 LGBT-Friendly Campus Climate Index.
 Methods – The author visited the library websites of all institutions and surveyed available GLBT-related resources. The criteria for online resources included: 1) A research guide for GLBT studies or geared toward GLBT students, 2) An individual identified within the research guide as a contact for GLBT-related resources, and 3) A subscription to EBSCO’s GLBT Life database.
 
 Whether or not the academic libraries had the above resources was then analyzed with each institution’s score on the climate survey scale. The author controlled for geographical location, religious affiliation, and campus setting of the college or university. 
 
 Main Results – There is a positive direct relationship between whether a library makes GLBT resources available on the Web and campus climate. However, only 25% of libraries surveyed published a research guide, 18% named a contact individual, and 31% subscribed to GLBT Life. 
 
 Conclusion – While parent institutions commit to GLBT students by taking the LBGT-Friendly Campus Climate Index survey, academic libraries lag behind providing online resources for this community. 
 
 The author recommends academic libraries: 
 
 • Create a top-level GLBT research guide.
 • Provide contact information for a staff person assigned to provide GLBT-related research assistance.
 • Assign a resource selector for GLBT-related resources.
 • Subscribe to GLBT-related databases.
 • Partner with GLBT organizations on campus to improve collections.
 • Promote GLBT-related collections to the campus community.
 • Perform an assessment of the information and resource needs of GLBT campus community members.
 • Ensure the GLBT community is included in programming and services.

Purpose Academic libraries continue to invest in eBooks to ensure access to content in various formats. This paper aims to examine eBook acquisition models, including patron-driven acquisitions, one-time purchases, focused collection subscriptions or large-scale subscriptions, to better understand how users engage with this content based on usage data. Design/methodology/approach Usage data provide insights into eBook acquisition and how access models influence use. This study defines the acquisition model for each eBook purchase. Data were examined to determine usage by acquisition model and cost-per-use. Findings This paper finds that for a large suburban community college, a large-scale subscription model has the lowest cost-per-use and serves the largest portion of students. Focused collection subscriptions supported small, specialized programs in the Allied Health, Emergency Services, and Nursing fields. Originality/value This paper examines how eBooks are acquired to determine which model best serves an academic library community, specifically a community college library, which is currently underrepresented in the literature.

University libraries exist to support the teaching , learning and research needs of their institution. This is done by providing the latest information sources for the academic community as university library users. This mission can be achieved well through effective and periodic marketing of information and library services, one of which is through reference services. This article discusses the use of reference and information services in supporting distance learning as one of the impacts of the spread of the Covid 19 outbreak (current situation and the way forward). The research method is quantitative descriptive research, with 78 respondents and using literature related to the transformation of reference services in the digital era. Data collection is processed based on the results of observations, interviews of the IAIN Batusangkar library reference service and other college libraries in providing online reference services. The analysis explains the presence of a reference service for students, especially Library Science students at IAIN Batusangkar. Analyzing how the media can help reference librarians in providing optimal services to the academic community remotely. Describe the strategies that reference librarians can use in creating real time reference transactions in a technology environment while maintaining the main function of reference services. Introducing the idea of a ‘new face’ model of reference and information services for the IAIN Batusangkar library in the period of distance learning, especially the rapid change in learning systems as a result of the corona virus outbreak ( covid 19). Libraries need to improve the reference service system they provide, so that the academic community can meet their information needs through library services remotely, anytime and anywhere. At the end of this paper, it is intended that librarians, especially reference librarians. Continue to serve readers with different needs, librarians must walk across the library, access computer screens from all campus intranet systems, answer emails and explore other interactive tools to reach customers in an effective, practical and effective way. Efficient in order to always satisfy users and keep closer to them, as the main purpose of the presence of reference services.

A Review of:
 Murray, A. & Ireland, A. (2018). Provosts’ perceptions of academic library value and preferences for communication: A national study. College & Research Libraries, 79(3), 336-365. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.79.3.336 
 Abstract
 Objective – To understand how public and private university provosts understand and interpret the value of academic libraries.
 Design – Electronic survey.
 Setting – Public and private colleges and universities in the United States with Carnegie classifications of master’s (small), master’s (medium), master’s (large), doctoral/research (DRU), research (RU/H), and research very high (RU/VH).
 Subjects – 209 provosts and chief academic officers.
 Methods – The authors distributed the survey to a pool of 935 provosts and chief academic officers in academic institutions. Questions were organized toward understanding participants’ perceptions of their libraries’ involvement with issues of institutional importance inspired by the Association of College & Research Libraries’ Value of Academic Libraries: A Comprehensive Research Review and Report, and high impact educational practices (HIPs) based on the work of George Kuh (2008). The survey also asked participants to select their data preferences when making library funding allocation decisions and their library communication preferences when making funding decisions. The authors received 209 responses and analyzed the content using Qualtrics to determine the highest and lowest ranked responses to each question. In addition, responses for specific survey questions were cross tabulated with demographic information about the institution to identify any potential trends that conformed to or deviated from the overall set of responses. Chi squares were then calculated to determine potential significance.
 Main Results – In terms of involvement with university initiatives, almost all of the 209 provosts and chief academic officers who responded to the survey had the perception that their respective libraries are either very involved or somewhat involved. The highest areas of involvement included: faculty research productivity (85.02%), accreditation (82.15%), student academic success (75%). and undergraduate retention (67.26%). Of note, only 9% of provosts indicated their libraries were very involved with enrollment. The authors found a trend that suggests that higher-enrollment institutions with a Carnegie ranking of doctoral/research, research, or research very high, increased provosts’ perceptions of their institutions’ libraries involvement in retention initiatives, student academic success, and faculty research productivity. A significant point of note: when asked why provosts did not view their institutions’ academic libraries as being involved in undergraduate retention initiatives, a significant number (76.12%) of respondents indicated that it was because the campuses overall did not recognize the role the libraries could play in retention initiatives. This position co-exists in an environment where the demographic, economic, and cultural transitions taking place in the United States are continuing to have a disruptive impact on higher education. Library directors need to make these connections much more tangible.
 Utilizing Kuh’s (2008) 10 high-impact educational practices, the authors gauged the participants’ perception of their libraries’ involvement in educationally purposeful activities. They found that 84.43% of provosts perceived their libraries as highly involved with undergraduate research, 78.39% with first-year seminars/experiences, 77.38% with collaborative assignments and projects, 75.76% with writing-intensive courses, 71.34% with common intellectual experiences, and 69.64% with capstone courses/projects. Fewer provosts indicated that their libraries were involved in diversity and global learning, learning communities, service learning/community-based learning, or internships. A significant point of note: when asked if their institution’s library had an impact on students’ decisions to continue enrollment, opinion was divided. Of the total respondents, a combined total of 91 indicated yes, based on demonstrated evidence or anecdotal or suspected evidence, while 81 respondents indicated unclear or no. This suggests further work is required for libraries in terms of investigating the potential role they might play in enrollment and how to demonstrate such.
 The authors also asked participants to indicate their opinion on the level of influence 11 different data types would have on a moderate (non-capital) funding request for the library. In terms of highest influence, 72.02% indicated they would like to see correlations linking the use of library services/resources with student success, 66.07% with undergraduate retention, and 56.55% with enrollment. Of moderate influence, 57.14% indicated they would like to see library usage data, 55.36% user satisfaction data, and 50% focus groups or other qualitative data. A total of 60% of the provosts also indicated that anecdotal evidence had a low influence on their funding allocations. Most provosts preferred the information to be communicated in a formal annual report, and indicated that the report should include information literacy student learning outcomes (SLOs) (50.9%), user satisfaction data (46.11%), correlations with faculty productivity (45.45%), correlations with student success (44.91%), correlations with undergraduate retention (43.11%), correlations with enrollment (42.51%), basic use data (40.12%), and faculty feedback (39.1%).
 Conclusion – Most provosts have an understanding that their libraries play an important role on campus, but demonstrating a strong connection to university goals and outcomes is essential. When seeking funding, academic library administrators should focus on projects or initiatives that support the priorities of the institution as a whole, and work to communicate evidence of the value of library services and resources within this context. This is achieved through communication channels that are both timely and relevant, and include a formal annual report or a dedicated budget meeting.

Purpose One of the most innovative library services recently introduced by public and academic libraries, the technology of 3D printing, has the potential to be used in multiple educational settings. The purpose of this paper is to examine how this novel library digital service motivates students’ learning, and to investigate managerial issues related to the introduction of 3D printing services at a medium-size urban community college library with restricted funding. Design/methodology/approach Since Fall 2014, the LaGuardia Library Media Resources Center has been offering a portable consumer-end 3D printer for classroom use. This paper provides historical context for the implementation of 3D printing as a service offered by librarians and discusses how the community college library managed 3D printing services to support class curriculum. At the end of the three-semester-long project students were asked to volunteer to take a survey conducted by the librarian and the class instructor. Findings The results of the student survey demonstrated that library 3D printing services significantly promoted students’ motivation to learn. The conceptual model of a makerspace should be an essential part of the twenty-first century academic library. To help make that possible this paper examines certain challenges and limitations faced by librarians when introducing 3D printing, including dedicated space management, professional education, and personnel availability. Originality/value During the project described students were able to use library services to print out and study complex engineering and biology models in 3D. The proper planning and management of this innovative service allows academic librarians to enhance class curriculum by providing the means of transforming theory into physical reality.

The University of Maryland University College (UMUC) is one of the eleven degree- granting institutions of the University System of Maryland (USM). UMUC plays a unique role among academic institutions in the State of Maryland in that it serves a large distant student population, with the proportion of students studying online approaching 50 percent of enrollments. Information and Library Services (ILS) at UMUC conducted a needs assessment survey to examine trends in student use of library resources, services, and instruction in order to understand how student usage patterns, needs, and preferences have changed as well as stayed the same. One important element of the survey was to obtain in-depth information on student usage patterns for electronic resources and services because (1) the library has increased delivery of these types of resources and services in the five years leading up to the current (2001) study and (2) several studies suggest that students are relying more heavily on online resources, both proprietary databases and the “free” Web.1 Therefore, ILS was interested in determining whether the shift to more online delivery of classes, and the simultaneous shift observed in user behavior in libraries in general (i.e., relying more heavily on online resources), would also affect student usage patterns and dependence on the physical library and online resources at UMUC. The findings of the survey followed national trends and demonstrated that nontraditional, predominantly part-time students’ usage patterns have changed and now favor the use of electronic resources (the Internet, in particular) and also mirror trends observed in traditional student behavior toward libraries and library resources in many important respects.

A review of: 
 Zhang, Li, Watson, Erin M. and Banfield, Laura. "The Efficacy of Computer-Assisted Instruction Versus Face-to-Face Instruction in Academic Libraries: A Systematic Review." The Journal of Academic Librarianship 33.4 (July 2007): 478-484.
 
 Objective – To conduct a systematic review of several studies comparing the efficacy of face-to-face versus computer-assisted instruction (CAI) for teaching basic library skills to patrons of academic libraries.
 
 Design – Systematic review of existing studies (randomised controlled trials and controlled trials). 
 
 Setting - College and university libraries 
 
 Subjects – The subjects studied were patrons of any type of academic library, whether university, college, or other post-secondary institution, receiving instruction in basic library skills. Ten studies were included in the review, of which seven were done in the United States, two in Australia, and one in Canada. The total number of subjects in all of the studies under review was 1283. Nine of the studies focused on undergraduates enrolled in specific courses (undergraduate courses ranging widely in subject area, or in one case a first year experience program); the other study focused on library instruction methods taught to students in a graduate research methods course, yet the study was still intended to measure the efficacy of library instruction methods, yet the study was still intended to measure the efficacy of library instruction methods. 
 
 Methods – One included study was a randomised controlled trial; the other nine were controlled trials. The date range under consideration was for studies done between 1990 and 2005. All original studies were required to compare the efficacy of face-to-face versus CAI instruction. Both information skills and students’ reactions to receiving the instruction were considered. To identify appropriate studies, searches were done across the following library and education-related databases: LISA, ERIC, and Library Literature. The authors screened the 728 unique studies’ bibliographic information for relevance against four criteria: studies had to be of a particular type of design (randomised controlled trials, controlled trials, cohort studies, and case studies), with a sample size greater than one and with pre- and post-test measurements; study participants had to be academic library patrons; the study needed to compare CAI and face-to-face instruction; and both the students’ information skills and reactions to the instruction had to be measured. This left 40 unique studies, which were then retrieved in full text. Next, studies were selected to meet the inclusion criteria further using the QUOROM format, a reporting structure used for improving the quality of reports of meta-analyses of randomised trials (Moher, David et al 1896 - 1900). Evaluation of methodological quality was then done using a dual method: authors Watson and Zhang assessed the studies independently, each using the “Checklist for Study Quality” developed by Downs and Black (Downs, Sara H. and Black, Nick 377-384), adapted slightly to remove non-relevant questions. After analysis, when additional information was needed, original study authors were contacted. Finally, ten studies were included in the analysis. 
 
 The instruction sessions covered many topics, such as catalog use, reading citations, awareness of library services and collections, basic searching of bibliographic databases, and more. But all could qualify as basic, rather than advanced, library instruction. All studies did pre- and post-tests of students’ skills – some immediately after instruction, and others with a time lapse of up to six weeks. Most authors created their own tests, though one adapted an existing scale. Individual performance improvement was not studied in many cases due to privacy concerns. 
 
 Main Results - Nine of the ten studies found CAI and face-to-face instruction equally effective; the tenth study found face-to-face instruction more effective. The students’ reaction to instruction methods varied – some students felt more satisfied with face-to-face instruction and felt that they learned better, while other studies found that students receiving CAI felt more confident. Some found no difference in confidence. 
 
 It was impossible to carry out a meta-analysis of the studies, as the skills taught, methods used, and evaluation tools in each case varied widely, and the data provided by the ten studies lacked sufficient detail to allow meta-analysis. As well, there were major methodological differences in the studies – some studies allowed participants the opportunities for hands-on practice; others did not. The CAI tutorials also varied – some were clearly interactive, and in other studies, it was not certain that the tutorial allowed for interactivity. 
 
 The authors of the systematic review identified possible problems with the selected studies as well. All studies were evaluated according to four criteria on the modified Downs-Black scale: reporting, external validity, and two measures of internal validity (possible bias and possible confounding). A perfect score would have been 25; the mean score was 17.3. Areas where authors lost points included areas such as failure to estimate data variability, failure to report participants lost to follow-up, failure to have blind marking of pre- and post-tests, failure to allocate participants randomly, and a variety of other areas. As well, few studies examined participants’ confidence level with computers before they participated in instruction.
 
 Conclusion – Based on this systematic review, CAI and face-to-face instruction appear to be equally effective in teaching students basic library skills. The authors of the study are reluctant to state this categorically, and issue several caveats: a) only one trial was randomised; b) seven of the studies were conducted in the USA, with the others being from Canada and Australia, and learning and teaching styles could be very different in other countries; c) the students were largely undergraduates, and the authors are curious as to whether results would be similar with faculty, staff, or older groups (though of course, not all undergraduates are traditional undergraduates); d) the tests ranged widely in design, and were largely developed individually, and the authors recommend developing a validated test; and e) if the pre- and post-tests are identical and given in rapid succession, this could skew results.

Penelitian ini mengeksplorasi persepsi pemustaka dalam memanfaatkan perpustakaan perguruan tinggi dalam hal ini universitas, dan korelasi antara persepsi pemustaka dan pemanfaatan perpustakaan. Hasil temuan menunjukkan bahwa perpustakaan universitas merupakan tempat yang menjadi pilihan untuk belajar dan menghabiskan waktu selama tidak ada perkuliahan di kampus. Kegiatan pemustaka di perpustakaan sering digunakan untuk hal-hal tertentu, termasuk studi individu, membaca, penggunaan komputer, mencari informasi, belajar kelompok, menggunakan layanan referensi dan informasi, dan pertemuan juga diskusi kelompok dan bersosialisasi. Korelasi antara penggunaan perpustakaan dan masing-masing kegiatan pemustaka diamati. Hasil temuan menunjukkan bahwa pemustaka menganggap perpustakaan universitas, sebagai tempat untuk belajar dan mencari informasi. Studi ini menunjukkan bagaimana pemustaka memandang dan menggunakan perpustakaan universitas dapat memperkuat, memberikan wawasan ke dalam proses pembelajaran, menumbuhkan enterpreneurship, dan memajukan peran pemustaka dalam komunitas akademis.This study explores the perception of users in utilizing the college library in this university and the correlation between the perception of the user and the utilization of the library. The findings show that university libraries are the preferred place to study and spend as long as there are no lectures on campus. Library activity is often used for certain things, including individual studies, reading, computer use, information seeking, group learning, reference, and information services, and group meetings and group discussions and socializing. The correlation between the use of libraries and each observation activity is observed. The findings show that the librarian considers the university library, as a place to learn and seek information. This study shows how viewers view and use university libraries can strengthen, provide insight into the learning process, foster entrepreneurship, and advance user roles in the academic community

A Review of:
 Waller, J. H. (2013). Undergrads as selectors: Assessing patron-driven acquisition at a liberal arts college. Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery & Electronic Reserve, 23(3), 127-148. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1072303X.2013.851052 
 
 Abstract
 
 Objective – To examine the viability of an undergraduate-focused, patron-driven acquisitions strategy in a small college library and to evaluate the titles acquired through this program for collection appropriateness, patron satisfaction, and cost effectiveness. 
 
 Design – Case study.
 
 Setting – A small, Catholic college in the Eastern United States with 1,850 undergraduate students.
 
 Subjects – Acquisitions of 432 print monographs selected by students and 18,624 print monographs selected by librarians and faculty members. 
 
 Methods – The author compared purchases selected from a pool of undergraduate interlibrary loan requests acquired from 2004 to 2013 to purchases acquired during the same time period through traditional means, including collection development work by librarians and selections by academic departments. The author evaluated titles for use based on circulation figures, for suitability using overlap analysis with the collections of four peer libraries, for patron satisfaction based on turnaround time, and for cost compared to items obtained through interlibrary loan.
 
 Main Results – Student selection had some advantages, including moderately increased circulation. Traditionally acquired titles were less likely to circulate initially and only 20.46% of these titles circulated two or more times compared to 24.77% of student-selected titles. Student selections were less likely to be acquired by peer libraries, and 63.66% of student-selected titles were unique, though they had a similar subject distribution to traditionally acquired titles. Compared to interlibrary loan, student-selected purchases had similar turnaround times and in the most recent three-year period had an average turnaround time that was one day faster than interlibrary loan. However, student acquisitions were far costlier than interlibrary loan. Items acquired through this program cost the library $39.70 on average while borrowing cost $6.18 on average. 
 
 Conclusion – The student selection process was found to be moderately successful, and the library will continue the program. Based on the analysis of peer library holdings, the author suggests more librarian intervention in the selection process. Instead of purchasing any requests that meet the criteria for student selection, the author recommends an intermediary selection step of evaluation by librarians. Student selection did not show the dramatic advantages represented in studies conducted in larger academic libraries, and this disparity could potentially be due to a difference in selection quality between the undergraduate students at this college and the graduate and research populations of larger institutions.

Purpose This study aims to describe a project that aims to give students a choice to complete their general education requirements without purchasing a textbook. Design/methodology/approach In total, 26 faculty, teaching in the new general education curriculum, at Central Washington University were given stipends to eliminate expensive textbooks and use free to the student resources such as open educational resources (OER) or library resources. The data was collected on student savings and student and faculty satisfaction with the program. Findings Many paths were created through the general education curriculum, so a student may easily finish these requirements without purchasing a textbook. The data from this case study coincide with the literature on the subject. Faculty found it fairly easy to replace their required textbooks with pedagogically sound, free resources. Students were relieved to have some financial relief and found the resources to be good. The student’s biggest complaint was that faculty often use very small portions of expensive required textbooks. Research limitations/implications This is a case study and the results are limited as such. This is one university and one general education curriculum. Also, if an academic library wants to replicate this case study, some funding is required. Practical implications Students struggle financially and alleviating the costs of textbooks is one-way librarians can ease that burden. Social implications Students struggle financially and alleviating the costs of textbooks is one-way librarians can ease that burden. Originality/value There have been some case studies written about OER, where 8 or 10 courses are replaced. There are studies written about zero-textbook-cost degrees at community colleges, but this case study explores a textbook-cost-free general education program at a state university.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is twofold. It first examines cross-institutional benchmark data about “library as place” from 99 US schools in the Measuring Information Service Outcomes (MISO) Survey (www.misosurvey.org). The data demonstrate the value of “library as place” to students in particular. Second, the paper shares case studies of how two college libraries made MISO Survey “library as place” data actionable. Lafayette College (Easton, Pennsylvania) analyzed local MISO Survey data after a renovation to validate return on investment. Earlham College (Richmond, Indiana) analyzed MISO Survey data to help secure a science library renovation and to justify an architectural study for its main library. Design/methodology/approach The paper begins with an analysis of “library as place” using aggregate benchmarks derived from US college and university respondents between 2012 and 2015. Specifically, the paper contrasts student and faculty perceptions of “library as place” via national benchmarks about: library services importance, satisfaction, and use (three benchmarks); hybrid online/“place-based” library services importance, satisfaction, and use (three benchmarks). Pivoting from higher education to individual, local perspectives, two case studies reveal how academic libraries used MISO Survey findings to demonstrate the value of “library as place” for renovation purposes. Findings The findings include that undergraduates make more frequent use than faculty of place-based services such as reference, equipment loans, and physical course reserves. Undergraduates also find most of these services more important than faculty do. Faculty makes generally more frequent use than undergraduates of online services such as library databases and the catalog. They find that these services to be more important than undergraduates do. Faculty and undergraduates use newer library discovery systems with equal frequency and find them to be equally important. Undergraduates find comfortable library spaces to be very important, and faculty considers them to be only a bit less important. Originality/value This is the first paper using MISO Survey data to focus on the importance and satisfaction of place-based library services involving cross-institutional comparisons for students and faculty. Previously published research using MISO Survey data have compared the use of place-based library services. This is also the first paper to offer case studies about how institutions use MISO Survey data to demonstrate the value of “library as place.”

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present findings of a study conducted to determine eReadiness status of public university libraries in Malawi to use mobile phones in the provision of library and information services.Design/methodology/approachThe researcher carried out in-depth semi-structured interviews with university/college librarians and information and communications technology (ICT) directors using interview guides. Students were also administered with a survey questionnaire that contained closed- and some open-ended questions. Proceedings of the interviews were recorded using a tape recorder whilst backup notes were recorded in a notebook. Qualitative data were transcribed and analysed using NVivo software whilst quantitative data were analysed using SPPS.FindingsThe study findings revealed that institutions studied had the ICT infrastructure necessary for offering library and information services on the mobile phone platform. Moreover, students had mobile phones which were connected to internet to facilitate their access to services offered. However, the institutions covered by this study did not have operational ICT policies to govern the operations of library and information services offered through mobile phones although draft ICT policies were available. The study further concluded that though the human resources required to manage the provision of library and information services through mobile phones in the institutions studied were available, they did not have the necessary skills and numbers to provide quality services. Other findings revealed that attitudes of library staff and students to the offering and access to services through mobile phones were positive. The study also revealed that there are some factors that could impact the offering of library services through mobile phones.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough Malawi has four public universities, this study only focused on three of them. Moreover, academic staff is another important user group of academic libraries. In this case, findings reported in this paper only focus on students. This implies that library’s readiness to offer services through mobile phones to this group remains unknown hence may have to be covered by future studies. Much as the study incorporated a quantitative strand in addition to the qualitative one, it neither involved theory testing nor confirmation as is the case with other related studies. This implies that the two theories used in this study (the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology and the technology-organisation-environment) were not used in the strict sense, which is empirical at the core, but rather to put the problem studied in the context of other related studies.Practical implicationsThe findings have practical implications in that they can be used for planning the implementation of library and information services through mobile phones in public university libraries in Malawi. Other related institutions can also use the findings as a reference point in planning the implementation of similar services.Originality/valueStudies relating to the use of mobile phones in the delivery of library and information services have not been conducted in public universities in Malawi. Findings of this study will, therefore, inform researchers intending to conduct similar or related studies not only in public universities in Malawi but other related institutions as well.

Abstract Objective – This study investigated usage, perceptions, and awareness of library research guides created using Springshare’s LibGuides among undergraduate and graduate health professions students. Methods – The researchers recruited 100 health professions students in April 2017 from Hunter College, a senior college within the City University of New York system. Participants were asked to complete a paper survey to ascertain their use, perceptions, and awareness of Springhare’s LibGuides. Results – Nearly two-thirds of study participants were not aware of library-created LibGuides and 68% had never used this tool. Compared to undergraduates, graduate students were more likely to be aware of LibGuides. The use of LibGuides was higher among graduate respondents (43%) than their undergraduate counterparts (30%). The study found low awareness and use of LibGuides among health professions students overall, regardless of age, gender, academic level, and health sciences concentration. Physical therapy students were more likely to use and be familiar with LibGuides than nursing, medical laboratory sciences, and speech-language pathology and audiology students. Participants reported using general subject guides more than course-specific guides, and the most commonly used page was the Databases guide. Of those participants who had used LibGuides, the vast majority (97%) said they found them useful in their studies. Conclusion – This study demonstrates low usage and awareness of LibGuides among health professions students at a large urban public college. Findings suggest a need for academic libraries serving such students to develop and implement strategies to promote awareness and increase usage of online research guides. The researchers recommend instructing with LibGuides during information literacy sessions and demonstrating their usefulness during reference consultations. Additional strategies include linking LibGuides to course sites through learning management systems such as Blackboard and collaborating with faculty members to better inform students about the guides.

Objective – The objective of this study was to examine and call attention to the current deficiency in standardized performance measures and usage metrics suited to assessing the value and impact of special collections and archives and their contributions to the mission of academic research libraries and to suggest possible approaches to overcoming the deficiency.
 
 Methods – The authors reviewed attempts over the past dozen years by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) to highlight the unique types of value that special collections and archival resources contribute to academic research libraries. They also examined the results of a large survey of special collections and archives conducted by OCLC Research in 2010. In addition, they investigated efforts by the Society of American Archivists (SAA) dating back to the 1940s to define standardized metrics for gathering and comparing data about archival operations. Finding that the library and archival communities have thus far failed to develop and adopt common metrics and methods for gathering data about the activities of special collections and archives, the authors explored the potential benefits of borrowing concepts for developing user-centered value propositions and metrics from the business community.
 
 Results – This study found that there has been a lack of consensus and precision concerning the definition of “special collections” and the value propositions they offer, and that most attempts have been limited in their usefulness because they were collections-centric. The study likewise reaffirmed a lack of consensus regarding how to define and measure basic operations performed by special collections and archives, such as circulating materials to users in supervised reading rooms. The review of concepts and metrics for assessing value in the business community, however, suggested new approaches to defining metrics that may be more successful.
 
 Conclusion – The authors recommend shifting from collection-centric to user-centric approaches and identifying appropriately precise metrics that can be consistently and widely applied to facilitate cross-institutional comparisons. Adopting a user-centric perspective, they argue, will provide a broader picture of how scholars interact with special collections at different points in the research process, both inside and outside of supervised reading rooms, as well as how undergraduate students change their thinking about evidence through interaction with primary sources. They authors outline the potential benefits of substituting the commonly used “reader-day” metric for tabulating reading room visits with a “reader-hour” metric and correlating it with item usage data in order to gauge the intensity of reading room use. They also discuss the potential benefits of assessing impact of instructional outreach in special collections and archives through measures of student confidence in pursuing research projects that involve primary sources.

A Review of:
 Howard, K., Nicholas, T., Hayes, T., & Appelt, C. W. (2014). Evaluating one-shot library sessions: Impact on the quality and diversity of student source use. Community & Junior College Libraries, 20(1-2), 27-38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02763915.2014.1009749 
 
 Objective – To assess the effect of one-shot library research workshops focused on database searching on student coursework bibliographies.
 
 Design – Comparative bibliometric analysis of student bibliographies.
 
 Setting – Career and Transfer Program at a community college in Illinois, United States of America.
 
 Subjects – Students taking an English 101 course.
 
 Methods – During the study, 39 sections of English 101 occurred. An optional library instruction session was offered to faculty and as a result students from 18 sections participated. Each session consisted of a 45-minute lecture and 30 minutes of independent research time. The librarian delivering the session introduced students to keyword searching and demonstrated the online library catalogue and two core electronic databases; Academic Search Complete, and Opposing Viewpoints in Context (OVC), and other databases of their choosing. Students in each session were required to submit a variety of assignments in an exit portfolio at the end of the semester. Sections of students were excluded if the instructors did not submit the students’ portfolios and they no longer taught at the community college, making it impossible to track down the portfolios. Exclusion also occurred in cases where sections were taught by the researchers. Seventeen sections who had attended library instruction group and 14 sections who had not attended the library instruction group were included in the study and randomised.
 
 Researchers evaluated portfolios according to the following criteria: whether the student who submitted the portfolio attended library instruction; whether their portfolio earned a pass or fail mark; total number of citations in bibliographies; number of each type of source (e.g., book, journal, Internet resource, or other; and dates of sources).
 
 Main Results – Data were collected from 115 portfolios submitted by students who had attended a library session and 92 portfolios from students who had not attended a library session. Student pass or fail status was not reported. Attending library instruction did not have a significant effect on the mean number of total citations: 5.513 for attendees vs. 6.076 for non-attendees. Of 205 student portfolios evaluated, there was no difference in the number of types of resources used by students who had library instruction (2.3 ± 0.1) and those who had none (2.2 ± 0.1; p > 0.05).
 
 Conclusion – The library instruction sessions did not increase the use of academic journals or the diversity of sources used. However, students were more likely to use library sources if they attended training. The authors recommend that demonstrating multiple databases should be covered in later sessions and more conceptual information literacy instruction should be the first step. Librarians could teach the value of different types of sources; connect the sources to the tools needed to locate and access them; and demonstrate how to effectively evaluate sources. The authors recommend further research to evaluate objectives, content and outcomes of this type of library instruction.

Purpose This paper aims to study the information needs and online information-seeking behaviors on mobile platforms of performing arts students at a college level. Design/methodology/approach Survey instruments were used to collect data from performing arts students at the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts (HKAPA), a metropolitan’s major performing arts tertiary institution. Data collected were analyzed through descriptive statistics and other statistical methods, and the music-related students were compared with the production-related students. Findings The result reveals that performing arts students all owned their mobile devices and often used mobile apps for non-academic purposes, but they did not often use mobile library services or read online academic contents with their mobile devices. The participants considered inadequate signal coverage, slow loading time, difficulty in reading on a mobile device and the lack of specialized mobile apps as more significant barriers affecting their usage. There are some significant differences between the music-related and production-related student groups in that music-related students watched lectures on the library websites and used electronic music scores more often than the production-related students. Practical implications This study contributes to the input for enhancements and policies to future mobile services and facilities of performing art libraries. Originality/value There have been scant studies on the mobile learning needs of performing arts students, especially in Asia.

Abstract
 
 Objective – This research focuses on First-Time-in-College (FTIC) student library usage during the first academic year as number of visits (frequency) and length of stay (duration) and how that might affect first-term grade point average (GPA) and first-year retention using the generalized propensity score (GPS). We also want to demonstrate that GPS is a proper tool that researchers in libraries can use to make causal inferences about the effects of library usage on student academic success outcomes in observation studies. 
 
 Methods – The sample for this study includes 6,380 FTIC students who matriculated in the fall 2014 and fall 2015 semesters at a large southeastern university. Students’ library usage (frequency and duration), background characteristics, and academic records were collected. The Generalized Propensity Score method was used to estimate the effects of frequency and duration of FTIC library visits. This method minimizes self-selection bias and allows researchers to control for 
 
 demographic, pre-college, and collegiate variables. Four dose-response functions were estimated for each treatment (frequency and duration) and outcome variable (GPA and retention).
 
 Results – The estimated dose-response function plots for first-term GPA and first-year retention rate have similar shapes, which initially decrease to the minimum values then gradually increase as the treatment level increases. Specifically, the estimated average first-term GPA is minimized when the FTIC student only visits the library three times or spends one hour in the library during his/her first semester. The threshold for first-year retention occurs when students visit the library 15 times or spend 21 hours in the library during their first semester. After those thresholds, an increase in students’ library usage is related to an increase in their academic success.
 
 Conclusions – The generalized propensity score method gives the library researcher a scientifically rigorous methodological means to make causal inferences in an observational study (Imai & van Dyk, 2004). Using this methodological approach demonstrates that increasing library usage is likely to increase FTIC students’ first-term GPA and first-year retention rates past a certain threshold of frequency and duration.

A Review of:
 Hess, A. N., & Hristova, M. (2016). To search or to browse: How users navigate a new interface for online library tutorials. College & Undergraduate Libraries, 23(2), 168-183. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10691316.2014.963274
 
 Abstract
 
 Objective – To discover how users interact with a new online interface for learning objects, user preferences for types of access when given both browsing and searching options, and user needs for tutorial subject matter.
 
 Design – Mixed methods, with quantitative analysis of web traffic and qualitative analysis of recorded search terms through grounded textual theory.
 
 Setting – An academic library in the Western United States of America.
 
 Subjects – Users of the Libraries’ online tutorials and learning objects.
 
 Methods – The researchers collected web traffic statistics and organically occurring searches from the Libraries’ tutorial access interface. They defined the collection period as the 2013/2014 academic year, with collection beginning in September 2013 and ending in April 2014. Web traffic for organic searches, facilitated searches (search results accessed through clicking on particular words in a tag cloud), and categorical browsing was collected via Google Analytics. They categorized other interaction types (accessing featured content, leaving the page, etc.) under an umbrella term of “other.” Their analysis of web traffic was limited to unique page views, with unique page views defined as views registered to different browser sessions. Unique page views were analyzed to determine which types of interface interaction occurred most frequently, both on-campus and off-campus, and whether there were differences in types of interaction preferred over time or by users with different points of origin. Individual organic search keywords and phrases, and the dates and times of those searches, were separately collected and recorded. One of the researchers coded the recorded organic search terms using grounded textual theory analysis, and the researcher formed generalized categories. They sent these categories and a random sample of 10% of the recorded search terms to librarians unaffiliated with the study, and used their categorizations of the search term samples to validate the initial researcher’s textual analysis.
 
 Main Results – After analyzing the 5,638 unique page views recorded, researchers found that categorical browsing was used more frequently than facilitated searching throughout the year, and more frequently than organic searching for 6 of the 8 recorded months. Organic searching was used more frequently than facilitated searching during most months, while both organic and facilitated searching were less likely to be engaged in by users working on Saturday or Sunday. They found that interactions in the “other” category were quite high, and the researchers attributed this to featured videos on the interface homepage being required for a number of classes. The researchers discovered that patterns in interface use were similar between on-campus and off-campus users, and that most traffic to the interface was through referral from other websites (such as the library homepage). Direct traffic (from URLs manually typed in or in documents) was the second most frequent point of access, while users arriving at the interface from a search engine interaction was a distant third. Grounded textual theory analysis of the 14,428 collected organic searches achieved a 92% consensus in coding, and showed a user focus in searching for specific resources, tasks, and knowledge, rather than broader conceptual searches. Additionally, researchers noticed that a significant number of users performed organic searches for videos that were featured on the front page, possibly indicating that certain users engage with search functions before viewing page content. 
 
 Conclusions – The researchers concluded that despite the limitations of the study, the usage volume and trends identified indicate that the Libraries’ online learning objects and tutorials are being used. They also concluded that the categorization and labelling of these learning objects has been successful because the categorical browsing function is used more than the other search functionalities. The researchers determined that they should consider the non-user in the future, and examine the barriers that students, faculty, and staff encounter when attempting to use online learning content. They affirm a need to develop, via further studies, a more thorough understanding of the motivations behind user interactions.

Purpose For most college and university libraries, deselection of monographs should be an essential component of collection development. Few of these libraries have unlimited space for book stack expansion. This research study aims to cover the reasons why this should be undertaken and how it can be accomplished in the humanities and social sciences. At the main campus of Adelphi University Libraries, a conservative approach was used to identify and carefully review monograph titles that were published more than 50 years ago, and, in most cases, this resulted in their deselection without significantly affecting the collection. For some of these titles, the author determined that they might be worth replacing with available e-books and the author did so. Design/methodology/approach A brief overview is provided to delineate why deselection is important, and how it can be accomplished. A literature review was prepared. It included a review of deselection at small-, medium- and large-sized college and university libraries. The pros and cons of print versus e-books for collection development were reviewed, including four case studies. The feasibility of replacing print reference titles with e-books was also covered. A review of the monograph weeding project at the Adelphi University Library in the humanities and social sciences is provided. Conclusions and a projection of next steps are also included. Findings An overwhelming majority of the monograph titles reviewed were deselected without adversely affecting the overall quality of the collection. A small number of available e-book editions were selected to replace some of these deselected titles. Research limitations/implications All of the titles deselected were published more than 50 years ago. All of these titles were in the social sciences and humanities. The deselection review was limited to philosophy, religion, history, political science, sociology, education and psychology. There were limitations on the amount of time available to review titles in most of these fields, and as a result, only a small percentage of the titles in our collection could be reviewed. Practical implications The library has very serious space constraints, which has made it difficult to provide the needed study space for members of the Adelphi University community. Some sections of the book collection are jam packed, with no room for expansion. Deselecting older less used titles and eliminating some sections of book shelves help address both of these problems. Replacing some of these print titles with e-books contributes as well. This deselection project has reduced the holdings of monograph print titles significantly. In the future, the author hopes to rely less on print titles and more on e-books for collection development. Social implications In most fields, college and university students would be better served for their research by more recently published titles. Older, less used titles, as well as those not used at all, should be deselected to make room for more useful and up-to-date titles. As more and more titles become readily available as e-books, the collections of print titles can be reduced. Being able to use e-books even when the library is closed is a great advantage. It should also be noted that these titles can be used by more than one user simultaneously. Originality/value In conducting the literature search, the author discovered that there were a large number of titles on deselecting print titles. There was also considerable research on e-book collection development. However, there were few that linked these two important topics. In this research article and case study, the author hopes to have made a significant contribution to linking them together.

Purpose This paper aims to confirm the importance of developing knowledge, skills and attitudes in the permanent use of digital scientific information, which complements the training of professionals in the biomedical and health areas, considering that this type of user communities require up-to-date and truthful information for future decision-making which will directly affect the health of patients. Design/methodology/approach The study started from the elaboration of a diagnosis on learning styles in a student community at the undergraduate level in the area of biomedical and health sciences of the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí (Mexico) (UASLP), through the application of the Honey-Alonso Learning Styles questionnaire (CHAEA), and by using such results it was possible to derive learning strategies for the achievement of digital information competencies that were effective in practice. Findings According to the diagnostic results, the learning styles with the greatest presence in students in the area of Biomedical and Health Sciences were identified and from this, precise didactic strategies were derived to enhance information skills in the use of digital sources. For this case, the Big6 Model was used and its implementation was combined (face-to-face and virtual) in the academic community studied, integrating an information skills development program in the digital library of the Center for Information in Biomedical Sciences (CICBI) from the university itself. Originality/value A practical experience is presented, which also offered concrete solutions, based on particular characteristics of the users. There is a low presence of studies of digital libraries’ users that consider aspects related to learning styles, especially applied from the perspective of information sciences and the digital library.

PurposeIn most higher education institutions, information literacy (IL) instruction is usually considered the purview of librarians, not disciplinary faculty. However, a small but growing body of research indicates that students learn the research process best when these skills are taught in the context of a course or a discipline. For this reason, teaching faculty should share ownership of IL instruction — but how? In this case study, community college librarians explain how they successfully trained faculty to integrate IL into their English Composition courses and teach IL independently.Design/methodology/approachUsing a multimethods approach, the investigators draw on faculty interviews, student surveys, and content analysis of student essays to evaluate the impact of faculty-led IL instruction on student learning after one semester.FindingsFaculty reported that their instruction of IL was improved, and students work better as a result of their collaboration with the librarians. Compared to previous semesters, faculty perceived gains in terms of students’ ability to synthesize and cite evidence in their writing. Student survey results indicate perceived gains in their IL skills, but an assessment of their written work reveals a discrepancy between this perception and the actual application of these skills.Research limitations/implicationsBecause there is no control group, no conclusions can be drawn as to whether faculty-led IL instruction is as effective as librarian-led IL instruction or whether students’ academic performance improves due to faculty teaching IL. However, the purpose of this study is primarily descriptive. It addresses how other libraries may create a culture of shared ownership of IL instruction on their campuses.Practical implicationsThis study offers an alternative model to library instruction and suggests ways instruction librarians can prioritize their outreach and instructional efforts to maximize impact on student learning.Originality/valueWhile much has been written about how librarians can improve IL instruction, few studies mention the role of faculty. This case study starts the conversation.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine teaching intent of information literacy threshold concepts via asynchronous reference transactions. Instructional content in academic librarians’ replies to research requests are analyzed for and mapped to threshold concepts contained in the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) framework. Design/methodology/approach The author mapped the instructional content of a research request reply template to the content of the ACRL framework, then took a random sample of research requests using the template during the calendar year 2016. Additional instructional content provided in the sample replies was also mapped to the framework. Findings In providing written instruction for students to create searches from keywords and search subject-specific databases, every frame is at least partially addressed in the template except Scholarship as Conversation. However, individual librarians adapt the template to teach as needed and there are examples in this case study of teaching aspects of all six frames asynchronously. Practical implications This study provides support for librarians to teach the threshold concepts of the ACRL framework asynchronously at the point of need during virtual reference, and the effective use of a research reply template to accomplish this instruction. Originality/value Few recent studies examine instructional intent in asynchronous/email reference. This study examines teaching the ACRL framework via reference rather than instructional sessions. A portion of this research was presented as a poster at the 2017 ACRL Conference in Baltimore, Maryland.

Objective – To study the ways in which novice academic librarians’ perceptions of librarianship develop from the time they decide to attend library school through their first 6 to 24 months of library work.
 
 Design – Grounded theory method utilizing two qualitative research techniques: one-on-one, face-to-face interviews and document analysis.
 
 Setting – The libraries of three Texas universities, three Texas four-year colleges, and one Texas community college.
 
 Subjects – 12 professional academic librarians who graduated from eight different graduate schools. Participants were 6 to 24 months into their professional careers and had little or no pre-professional experience.
 
 Methods – The researchers sought participants through mailings, emails, electronic mailing list postings, and referrals from other participants. They conducted a small pilot study with two novice librarians to refine their research methodology. The researchers interviewed additional participants and analyzed the interview transcripts until categories of interest were identified and saturated. Saturation occurred at 12 participants, not including the pilot participants. Each interview was 30-45 minutes. The researchers recorded the interviews and systematically coded the transcripts using activist imagery. Four of the participants gave the researchers their “statement of purpose” essay that they used when applying for graduate school. These documents were also discussed with participants and analyzed. 
 
 Main Results – From the data they collected, the researchers identified six categories of interest regarding librarians’ perceptions of librarianship: deciding upon a career, experiencing graduate school, continuing education, defining the work, evaluating the work, and (re)imagining the future. In considering librarianship as a career, the participants had not been entirely sure what it entailed, but they utilized what they did know about libraries and librarianship to generally deem the profession solid, safe, and/or noble. They had further explored librarianship to determine its compatibility with their personal characteristics. Such personal reflection had led participants to graduate school where they gained a real understanding of librarianship. The participants had not generally found graduate school to be academically challenging. They had also valued practical over theoretical instruction. Once in the workplace, the participants noted the value of continuing education to strengthen the skills they had learned in graduate school. Participants benefitted the most from informal mentoring and on-the-job training, i.e. “learning by doing” (p. 192). As novice librarians, the participants had learned to feel their way around their job expectations and note the differences between their responsibilities and those of paraprofessionals in the library. As the novice librarians further defined their work, they had also learned that academic librarianship is the sum of many parts, including collaboration with peers. In evaluating their work, the participants noted that they had come to distinguish “real” academic library work, that which uses their expertise and helps society, from “other” work such as clerical work (pp. 195-196). The sixth and final category was “(re)imagining the future.” Most of the participants predicted having advanced as academic librarians in the next five years but were otherwise unsure about what their futures would hold. 
 
 Conclusion – The researchers made a number of valuable observations in their work with novice librarians. As the step of deciding upon a career seemed to be a murky quest, they thought it would be helpful to analyze public opinion of librarianship and use that information to offset misperceptions about what librarians do. This might help those considering librarianship to make informed and conscious decisions. 
 
 The study data also provided insight into graduate school. The fact that the participants did not consider graduate school to be rigorous concerned the researchers. They feared that librarians entering the field might not deem it a serious profession. Because the participants favored practical over theoretical classes, the researchers thought it important for graduate schools to teach theoretical concepts in a way that is more satisfying to students. They felt that other applied fields, such as nursing, might provide examples of how to do so. The researchers also noted that graduate schools could do more to prepare students for life on the job. As new librarians reported favouring “real” work over “other” work, the researchers felt that students should hear it first in graduate school that all the work librarians do is an important and necessary part of academic librarianship. As most participants were uncertain about what their futures as academic librarians might look like, the researchers thought that graduate school professors should address that issue as well. 
 
 Data from this study also gave insight into how employers might best serve new librarians. The researchers suggest looking to new teacher induction programs to get ideas for orienting new librarians to the profession. Orientation might include a combination of formal and informal techniques such as peer mentors, peer observation, new librarian training, and new librarian handbooks in the first year of employment. 
 
 Finally, the researchers proposed ideas for future research. They believe it might be helpful to study experienced academic librarians or new public librarians for comparison to this study.

Aim/Purpose: Business analytics is a cross-functional field that is important to implement for a college and has emerged as a critically important core component of the business curriculum. It is a difficult task due to scheduling concerns and limits to faculty and student resources. This paper describes the process of creating a central video repository to serve as a platform for just in time teaching and the impact on student learning outcomes. Background: Industry demand for employees with analytical knowledge, skills, and abilities requires additional analytical content throughout the college of business curriculum. This demand needs other content to be added to ensure that students have the prerequisite skills to complete assignments. Two pedagogical approaches to address this issue are Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) and scaffolding, grounded in the Vygoskian concept of “Zone of Proximal Development. Methodology: This paper presents a case study that applies scaffolding and JiTT teaching to create a video repository to add business analytics instruction to a curriculum. The California Critical Thinking Skills Test (CCTST) and Major Field Test (MFT) scores were analyzed to assess learning outcomes. Student and faculty comments were considered to inform the results of the review. Contribution: This paper demonstrates a practical application of scaffolding and JiTT theory by outlining the process of using a video library to provide valuable instructional resources that support meaningful learning, promote student academic achievement, and improve program flexibility. Findings: A centrally created library is a simple and inexpensive way to provide business analytics course content, augmenting standard content delivery. Assessment of learning scores showed an improvement, and a summary of lessons learned is provided to guide implications. Recommendations for Practitioners: Pedagogical implications of this research include the observation that producing a central library of instructor created videos and assignments can help address knowledge and skills gaps, augment the learning of business analytics content, and provide a valuable educational resource throughout the college of business curriculum. Recommendation for Researchers: This paper examines the use of scaffolding and JiTT theories. Additional examination of these theories may improve the understanding and limits of these concepts as higher education evolves due to the combination of market forces changing the execution of course delivery. Impact on Society: Universities are tasked with providing new and increasing skills to students while controlling the costs. A centrally created library of instructional videos provides a means of delivering meaningful content while controlling costs. Future Research: Future research may examine student success, including the immediate impact of videos and longitudinally using video repositories throughout the curriculum. Studies examining the approach across multiple institutions may help to evaluate the success of video repositories. Faculty acceptance of centrally created video libraries and assignments should be considered for the value of faculty recruiting and use in the classroom. The economic impact on both the university and students should be evaluated.

A Review of:
 Henry, J., Glauner, D., & Lefoe, G. (2015). A double shot of information literacy instruction at a community college. Community & Junior College Libraries, 21(1-2), 27-36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02763915.2015.1120623
 
 Abstract
 
 Objective – To evaluate the impact of providing multiple information literacy (IL) sessions, instead of a single “one-shot” session, to students in face-to-face and online English courses.
 
 Design – Non-experimental, using pre-test and post-test surveys for one group, and only a post-test survey for the other group. 
 
 Setting – A small community college in North Carolina, United States of America.
 
 Subjects – 352 students enrolled in 2 successive 3-credit English courses, excluding those under the age of 18, for a total of 244 participants. 
 
 Methods – The researchers selected two English courses, ENG 111 and ENG 112, of which most students were required to take at least one to earn a degree or certification. After consulting with faculty, the researchers designed two workshops for each course that integrated active and group learning techniques. The ENG 111 workshops covered pre-searching (e.g., mind mapping and selecting search terms) and database searching in the first session, and website analysis and research (e.g., URLs, Google’s advanced search, and the evaluative CRAAP test) in the second session. The ENG 112 workshops covered subject database searching in the first session and evaluative analysis of magazine and scholarly journal articles in the second session. Instructors provided web-based tutorials to online course sections as a substitute for the face-to-face sessions. Course assignments were the same for both online and face-to-face classes. 
 
 The researchers used anonymous online surveys. ENG 111 students completed pre-test and post-test surveys for their two workshops during the fall 2014 semester. The surveys consisted of seven fill-in-the-blank and multiple-choice questions measuring pre-searching, research, and website analysis skills, and three Likert-type 1-5 rating scale questions measuring comfort levels. ENGL 112 students completed their post-test survey in the spring 2015 semester, which consisted of the same three 1-5 rating scale questions measuring comfort levels, to further test the effectiveness of multiple sessions.
 
 Main Results – The ENG 111 pre-test survey had 244 (66.67% female and 33.33% male) respondents and the post-test had 150 (72.37% female and 28.69% male) respondents. When comparing results, scores increased for pre-searching, specifically understanding of methods for brainstorming search terms (9%), and for all measures of website analysis and research, namely understanding of library databases (7.63%), choosing correct evaluative criteria (4.49%), recognizing reliable top-level domains (TLDs) .edu (1.15%) and .gov (11.21%), and Google’s advanced search (10.43%). Post-test scores decreased on the measures of understanding of a thesis statement (7%) and narrowing a topic if there’s too much information (6%). For comfort levels, neutral responses did not vary much, but there was a shift in responses from “not comfortable” to “somewhat comfortable” and “very comfortable.” Across three measures, namely getting started with a research paper, library research skills, and writing an academic research paper, participants’ “not comfortable” responses decreased and their “comfortable” responses increased. The ENG 112 post-test survey had 29 (60.71% female and 39.29% male) respondents and measured the same comfort levels. In addition, responses showed further improvement for all three questions. Within-subject analysis of both surveys showed slight gender variations. On several pre-test and post-test measures, females scored lower than males in understanding of databases, Google’s advanced search, and website analysis.
 
 Conclusion – The researchers conclude that expanding IL instruction from a single “one-shot” to four sessions had a positive impact on student learning, particularly the ability to evaluate websites and to use Google’s advanced search. Student participants expressed increased comfort levels and confidence in their research skills. To address decreases on the post-test survey described above, the researchers planned to focus more on research topic narrowing and using thesis statements alongside the research process in future IL sessions. In terms of instructional strategy, the researchers found timing the workshops closely with the course assignments was helpful and concluded that the use of hands-on, interactive elements was successful in engaging and assessing students’ understanding in the workshops.

A review of:
 Kuhlthau, Carol C. “Inside the Search Process: Information Seeking from the User's Perspective.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 42.5 (1991): 361-71.
 
 Objective – To extend understanding of purposeful information seeking and to present a model of the information search process (ISP) from the perspective of the user.
 
 Design – Review of theoretical foundation, summing up of qualitative and quantitative data from a series of five foundational studies, and presentation of ISP model.
 
 Setting – Summarised research was conducted primarily in high school and college environments where subjects were investigating an assigned topic. A small proportion of public libraries were used in the fifth study within the reviewed series. 
 
 Subjects – The ISP model as presented in this ‘classic’ article is based on studies involving a total of 558 participants. The first study involved 26 academically advanced high school seniors, and the 2 subsequent studies involved respectively 20 and 4 of the original participants following their completion of 4 years of college. The final 2 studies involved respectively 147 high, middle and low achieving high school seniors, and 385 academic, public and school library users. 
 
 Methods – This paper presents the foundation for the ISP model by reviewing the relationship between Kelly’s personal construct theory, Belkin, Brooks, and Oddy’s investigation of cognitive aspects of the constructive information seeking process, and Taylor’s work on levels of information need (“Question-negotiation”) and value-added information (“Value-added”). This is followed by a review of Kuhlthau’s five foundational studies, which investigated the common information seeking experiences of users who were seeking to expand knowledge related to a particular topic or problem. 
 
 The first of these studies was a small-scale exploration in which participants were given two assignments. Questionnaires, journaling, search logs, and reflective writing were used to collect data throughout the process of assignment completion. Data collection was augmented by case studies involving in-depth interviews and construction of timelines and flowcharts with six study participants. The six-stage ISP model was developed from qualitative content analysis of participants’ perceptions and experiences (Kuhlthau, “Library Research Process”). 
 
 In the second study, the same questionnaire was used to determine how students’ perceptions of the ISP had changed over time. Post-college responses were compared to responses given in high school and statistical significance was determined through t Tests (Kuhlthau, Perceptions). Four of the original 6 case study participants were interviewed in the third study, in which interview data and search process timelines were compared with high school case studies (Kuhlthau, Longitudinal). 
 
 In the fourth and fifth studies, large-scale field studies were conducted to verify the ISP model. Process surveys elicited participants’ thoughts and feelings at initiation, midpoint, and closure of a search task. Data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics including measures of significance and analysis of variance (Kuhlthau, Information Search; Kuhlthau et al.). Following a summation of these 5 research studies, this article details and discusses the ISP model.
 
 Main results – Based on the data from the five studies, the ISP presents a constructivist approach to information seeking and incorporates affective, cognitive, and physical dimensions at each of six information searching stages: initiation, topic selection, pre-focus exploration, focus formulation, information collection, and presentation. Individuals become aware of an information need at initiation. Feelings of uncertainty and apprehension are common as wide-ranging task exploration begins. At topic selection a general topic is selected and users frequently experience initial optimism, which is commonly followed by confusion and doubt as pre-focus exploration commences and users struggle to extend personal knowledge through initial investigation of the general topic. A turning point occurs during focus formulation as constructs become clearer and uncertainty decreases. During information collection the user is able to articulate focused need and is able to interact effectively with intermediaries and systems. Relief is commonly experienced at presentation stage when findings are presented or used. Although stages are laid out sequentially, Kuhlthau notes that the ISP is an iterative process in which stages merge and overlap. Central to this model is the premise that uncertainty is not due merely to a lack of familiarity with sources and technologies, but is an integral and critical part of a process of learning that culminates in finding meaning through personal synthesis of topic or problem. 
 
 Conclusion – Kuhlthau provides evidence for a view of information seeking as an evolving, iterative process and presents a model for purposeful information searching which, if understood by users, intermediaries and information system designers, provides a basis for productive interaction. While users will benefit from understanding the evolving nature of focus formulation and the affective dimensions of information seeking, intermediaries and systems are challenged to improve information provision in the early formative stages of a search. Although Kuhlthau identifies this research on the ISP as exploratory in nature, this article affords methodological insight into the use of mixed methods for exploring complex user-oriented issues, presents a model that effectively communicates an approximation of the common information-seeking process of users, and provides ongoing impetus for exploring the user’s perspective on information seeking.

Libraries are designed to support the communities and populations they serve through access to services and materials. Along with supporting faculty and staff, academic libraries work to serve the needs of their students. Academic libraries can be a welcoming environment for college students in general, and some studies are beginning to show that this is particularly true for autistic students, who use the library to pursue special interests, as an escape from a bustling sensory environment on campus, and, of course, for studying and pursuing academic success. Through semi-structured interviews, this study sought to better understand how academic librarians are working together with autism student support programs to provide more targeted services and support. In this study, the researcher reached out to autism support programs for college students across the USA to learn about library involvement. The findings suggest that academic librarians are interested in better understanding the preferences of autistic students and collaborating across campus to provide more inclusive services. Additionally, administrators of autism support programs demonstrated interest in learning more about how the library could be a strong collaborator, suggesting broad practical implications for the results of this study.

Purpose Less attention has been paid to users’ interactions and behavior in studying multilingual search. Although digital library researchers have yet to assess user interaction and behavior in multilingual search, they have concurred that there is a need for user studies that document the extent to which information retrieval systems meet multilingual users’ needs and expectations. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach This study is composed of five individual cases. The case study participants were Saudi students enrolled either at a large state university or Historically Black College and University located in the same community. Research questions are, what do Saudi Digital Library (SDL) users experience when searching within the SDL in Arabic and English? And what strategies do they use if they fail to find resources? Data collected for this study were via a qualitative method called video-stimulated recall. Findings In the Arabic search tasks, participants realized that finding resources is not easy. Participants expressed their concerns about the lack of relevance and accuracy of results returned by the search system, indicating weak trust and confidence in the search system. Whereas in the English search task, participants felt more satisfied and confident in their ability to trust the results returned from the search system. Participants expressed their satisfaction in the search experience as it provided them with accurate and varying resources. The participants faced difficulties finding Arabic resources than English resources in the SDL. Originality/value This study is considered one of the earliest works in studying the information-seeking behavior of multilingual digital libraries in the Arabic language. The value of this study arises as being the first study to investigate and report the information-seeking behavior of SDL users.

Information literacy at the graduate level can happen at the intersection of research method education and mentorship into a disciplinary community of practice with its own traditions of inquiry, communication, and knowledge creation. Funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the Library as Research Lab Project at the University of Michigan enables graduate students, academic librarians, and information science faculty to engage in a series of research activities together, illuminating tacit knowledge in information studies and librarianship, both as a discipline and as a profession.
 In the project, three interconnected labs pursue authentic research questions emerging from challenges faced by the Library while providing School of Information students with mentorship, new skills, and a fellowship stipend. A common curriculum across the labs includes research ethics, publishing, project management, and current issues in higher education research. Engaging with the frames of “Research as Inquiry” and “Scholarship as Conversation” from the Association of College and Research Libraries Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education​, students also learn how to effectively discuss, iterate upon, and present their research activities to different audiences. At the end of the fellowship, students enter the profession with an understanding of complex challenges facing libraries and with new strategies for responding to ambiguity and pursuing new solutions through research.
 As we complete the final year of the grant, the librarians from the Design Thinking for Library Services Lab will reflect on lessons learned and share student perspectives as a way of discussing how similar initiatives might facilitate positive and critically engaged research projects at other institutions. Attendees will be able to describe strategies for developing similar environments in support of authentic research experiences and will be able to apply strategies documented in a mentoring handbook from the project in their own work.

Watch the VIDEO here. Presenter - Frédéric Brodkom.The ARES-CCD (formerly CUD) is the French-speaking universities and high-school of Belgium Commission for the Cooperation to Development. With an annual budget of 31 M€ fully dedicated to the academic development of actually 19 universities of North and Central Africa, South-East Asia, Western South America and Greater Antilles, this commission brings together volunteers of the academic, scientific and administrative staffs of our universities. Since 2000, librarians are strongly involved in this project with the aim to develop the partner’s libraries, to improve their infrastructures and operations, to facilitate their access to documentary resources and to strengthen their librarians' skills.Given the important documentary needs of students and researchers in the South and the lack of financial resources, the promotion of Open Science is more than an obvious. We will show that, in addition to our activities of purchasing books or materials, basic training or library renovation, we develop, in close partnership with our colleagues, the Open Science culture in six fields:(1) The installation and support of open-source ILS (mainly KOHA and PMB), including the learning of IT teams(2) The harvesting and promotion of OA resources via our Web Portal, including subscription to official resources of international organization(3) The development of policies to develop local institutional repositories for new and archived (printed) publications and thesis (DSpace support, purchase of scanner, etc)(4) The support to the development of university presses to reduce/abolish the excessive cost of printed course materials for students(5) Training and awareness-raising of library trainers for academic social networks, data exchange platforms, community-based researchers' sites, OA use, etc.(6) Promote the obligation to deposit in our university repositories the scientific papers financed by the ARES-CCD cooperation and co-signed by Belgian researchers and partners of developing countries (academic and doctorate students).Concrete case studies of our 17 years of experience in the South from Haiti to Vietnam will illustrate these actions. Perspectives on future projects will also be discussed, such as a week, jointly with all our partners, of exchange and work in Belgium in 2018 (as already done in 2016) on the topic of the practical implementation of Open Access in their universities.

In 2015, I embarked on a new project with my former PhD supervisor at Edinburgh: to create a respected area studies journal of Highland Asia that would be both accessible and accountable to the communities where, and with whom, we do our research: Highland Asia! We successfully built up an editorial board of renowned scholars, convinced the Edinburgh University Library to be our publisher, and soon we had our journal online, with a short first issue free to download anywhere. However, we suddenly realised that we had lost something in the process. While we now engage with the global academic community, offering excellent peer-review, and editorial value to authors, we also found we were beginning to replicate a publishing model we were trying to get away from. Like pay-wall journals we were operating in a space at a distance, closed off, and culturally inaccessible to the communities we were eager to engage with. Can Open Access forge new pathways that are different from the pay-wall journals and big publishers? In recent months, we have started to look at our old notes, to see where we might regain our footing, to get back that ‘anarchist’ DIY inspiration! Providing free downloadable PDFs is good, but it is no great achievement anymore. How can we meaningfully bridge the worlds we work in so that knowledge production itself is more open? In our case, we think one approach is to open up the entire publishing process. In addition to indigenous authors and reviewers, we want to engage proof-readers, copyeditors, typesetters, photographers, cover designers, printers and remote college departments and libraries across the Himalayas. We have only started exploring this in 2020, but in the process we have discovered that there is great demand, for example, for printed versions. Easily produced locally, we could set up a basic subscription model, and stock local college libraries, book stores, and coffee shops in Northeast India, Bhutan, Sikkim, and Nepal. By opening up, and engaging in dialogue with local scholars, librarians, designers, and artists we have found all kinds of opportunities that help our journal move in the direction of being truly ‘Open Access’ in every way. In Edinburgh, we have also found a community of PhD students doing research on the Himalayas, excited to learn about publishing. We are forming an editorial collective that is now connecting with our community in Asia, offering additional contacts that can facilitate research exchange. Our journal remains experimental. We have, for example, decided to go with a rolling publishing model instead of distinct issues. I also want to engage my own students in Tromsø, especially in editorial management. I also hope we can develop synergies with the Open Access community in Norway. Beyond library publishing, we see an opportunity to create a new space, instead of combatting an old space dominated by for-profit publishers. Finally, by crossing borders, and truly opening up in this way, we also push this idea of knowledge production towards greater accountability. Indeed we are calling for truly tangible ways in decolonising publishing.

If I find out that you have bought a $90 red light sabre, Tara, well there's going to be trouble. -- Kevin Brabazon A few Saturdays ago, my 71-year old father tried to convince me of imminent responsibilities. As I am considering the purchase of a house, there are mortgages, bank fees and years of misery to endure. Unfortunately, I am not an effective Big Picture Person. The lure of the light sabre is almost too great. For 30 year old Generation Xers like myself, it is more than a cultural object. It is a textual anchor, and a necessary component to any future history of the present. Revelling in the aura of the Australian release for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, this paper investigates popular memory, an undertheorised affiliation between popular culture and cultural studies.1 The excitement encircling the Star Wars prequel has been justified in terms of 'hype' or marketing. Such judgements frame the men and women cuing for tickets, talking Yodas and light sabres as fools or duped souls who need to get out more. My analysis explores why Star Wars has generated this enthusiasm, and how cultural studies can mobilise this passionate commitment to consider notions of popularity, preservation and ephemerality. We'll always have Tattooine. Star Wars has been a primary popular cultural social formation for a generation. The stories of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca, Darth Vader, Yoda, C-3PO and R2D2 offer an alternative narrative for the late 1970s and 1980s. It was a comfort to have the Royal Shakespearian tones of Alec Guinness confirming that the Force would be with us, through economic rationalism, unemployment, Pauline Hanson and Madonna discovering yoga. The Star Wars Trilogy, encompassing A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, was released between 1977 and 1983. These films have rarely slipped from public attention, being periodically 'brought back' through new cinematic and video releases. The currency of Star Wars is matched with the other great popular cultural formations of the post-war period: the James Bond series and Star Trek. One reason for the continued success of these programmes is that other writers, film makers and producers cannot leave these texts alone. Bond survives not only through Pierce Brosnan's good looks, but the 'Hey Baby' antics of Austin Powers. Star Trek, through four distinct series, has become an industry that will last longer than Voyager's passage back from the Delta Quadrant. Star Wars, perhaps even more effectively than the other popular cultural heavyweights, has enmeshed itself into other filmic and televisual programming. Films like Spaceballs and television quizzes on Good News Week keep the knowledge system and language current and pertinent.2 Like Umberto Eco realised of Casablanca, Star Wars is "a living example of living textuality" (199). Both films are popular because of imperfections and intertextual archetypes, forming a filmic quilt of sensations and affectivities. Viewers are aware that "the cliches are talking among themselves" (Eco 209). As these cinematic texts move through time, the depth and commitment of these (con)textual dialogues are repeated and reinscribed. To hold on to a memory is to isolate a moment or an image and encircle it with meaning. Each day we experience millions of texts: some are remembered, but most are lost. Some popular cultural texts move from ephemera to popular memory to history. In moving beyond individual reminiscences -- the personal experiences of our lifetime -- we enter the sphere of popular culture. Collective or popular memory is a group or community experience of a textualised reality. For example, during the Second World War, there were many private experiences, but certain moments arch beyond the individual. Songs by Vera Lynn are fully textualised experiences that become the fodder for collective memory. Similarly, Star Wars provides a sense-making mechanism for the 1980s. Like all popular culture, these texts allow myriad readership strategies, but there is collective recognition of relevance and importance. Popular memory is such an important site because it provides us, as cultural critics, with a map of emotionally resonant sites of the past, moments that are linked with specific subjectivities and a commonality of expression. While Star Wars, like all popular cultural formations, has a wide audience, there are specific readings that are pertinent for particular groups. To unify a generation around cultural texts is an act of collective memory. As Harris has suggested, "sometimes, youth does interesting things with its legacy and creatively adapts its problematic into seemingly autonomous cultural forms" (79). Generation X refers to an age cohort born between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s. Finally cultural studies theorists have found a Grail subculture. Being depthless, ambivalent, sexually repressed and social failures, Xers are a cultural studies dream come true. They were the children of the media revolution. Star Wars is integral to this textualised database. A fan on the night of the first screening corrected a journalist: "we aren't Generation X, we are the Star Wars generation" (Brendon, in Miller 9). An infatuation and reflexivity with the media is the single framework of knowledge in which Xers operate. This shared understanding is the basis for comedy, and particularly revealed (in Australia) in programmes like The Panel and Good News Week. Television themes, lines of film dialogue and contemporary news broadcasts are the basis of the game show. The aesthetics of life transforms television into a real. Or, put another way, "individual lives may be fragmented and confused but McDonald's is universal" (Hopkins 17). A group of textual readers share a literacy, a new way of reading the word and world of texts. Nostalgia is a weapon. The 1990s has been a decade of revivals: from Abba to skateboards, an era of retro reinscription has challenged linear theories of history and popular culture. As Timothy Carter reveals, "we all loved the Star Wars movies when we were younger, and so we naturally look forward to a continuation of those films" (9). The 1980s has often been portrayed as a bad time, of Thatcher and Reagan, cold war brinkmanship, youth unemployment and HIV. For those who were children and (amorphously phrased) 'young adults' of this era, the popular memory is of fluorescent fingerless gloves, Ray Bans, 'Choose Life' t-shirts and bubble skirts. It was an era of styling mousse, big hair, the Wham tan, Kylie and Jason and Rick Astley's dancing. Star Wars action figures gave the films a tangibility, holding the future of the rebellion in our hands (literally). These memories clumsily slop into the cup of the present. The problem with 'youth' is that it is semiotically too rich: the expression is understood, but not explained, by discourses as varied as the educational system, family structures, leisure industries and legal, medical and psychological institutions. It is a term of saturation, where normality is taught, and deviance is monitored. All cultural studies theorists carry the baggage of the Birmingham Centre into any history of youth culture. The taken-for-granted 'youth as resistance' mantra, embodied in Resistance through Rituals and Subculture: The Meaning of Style, transformed young people into the ventriloquist's puppet of cultural studies. The strings of the dancing, smoking, swearing and drinking puppet took many years to cut. The feminist blade of Angela McRobbie did some damage to the fraying filaments, as did Dick Hebdige's reflexive corrections in Hiding in the Light. However, the publications, promotion and pedagogy of Gen X ended the theoretical charade. Gen X, the media sophisticates, played with popular culture, rather than 'proper politics.' In Coupland's Generation X, Claire, one of the main characters believed that "Either our lives become stories, or there's just no way to get through them." ... We know that this is why the three of us left our lives behind us and came to the desert -- to tell stories and to make our own lives worthwhile tales in the process. (8) Television and film are part of this story telling process. This intense connection generated an ironic and reflexive literacy in the media. Television became the basis for personal pleasures and local resistances, resulting in a disciplined mobilisation of popular cultural surfaces. Even better than the real thing. As the youngest of Generation Xers are now in their late twenties, they have moved from McJobs to careers. Robert Kizlik, a teacher trainer at an American community college expressed horror as the lack of 'commonsensical knowledge' from his new students. He conducted a survey for teachers training in the social sciences, assessing their grasp of history. There was one hundred percent recognition of such names as Madonna, Mike Tyson, and Sharon Stone, but they hardly qualify as important social studies content ... . I wondered silently just what it is that these students are going to teach when they become employed ... . The deeper question is not that we have so many high school graduates and third and fourth year college students who are devoid of basic information about American history and culture, but rather, how, in the first place, these students came to have the expectations that they could become teachers. (n. pag.) Kizlik's fear is that the students, regardless of their enthusiasm, had poor recognition of knowledge he deemed significant and worthy. His teaching task, to convince students of the need for non-popular cultural knowledges, has resulted in his course being termed 'boring' or 'hard'. He has been unable to reconcile the convoluted connections between personal stories and televisual narratives. I am reminded (perhaps unhelpfully) of one of the most famous filmic teachers, Mr Holland. Upon being attacked by his superiors for using rock and roll in his classes, he replied that he would use anything to instil in his students a love of music. Working with, rather than against, popular culture is an obvious pedagogical imperative. George Lucas has, for example, confirmed the Oprahfied spirituality of the current age. Obviously Star Wars utilises fables, myths3 and fairy tales to summon the beautiful Princess, the gallant hero and the evil Empire, but has become something more. Star Wars slots cleanly into an era of Body Shop Feminism, John Gray's gender politics and Rikki Lake's relationship management. Brian Johnson and Susan Oh argued that the film is actually a new religion. A long time ago in a galaxy far far away -- late 1970s California -- the known universe of George Lucas came into being. In the beginning, George created Star Wars. And the screen was without form, and void. And George said, 'Let there be light', and there was Industrial Light and Magic. And George divided the light from the darkness, with light sabres, and called the darkness the Evil Empire.... And George saw that it was good. (14) The writers underestimate the profound emotional investment placed in the trilogy by millions of people. Genesis narratives describe the Star Wars phenomenon, but do not analyse it. The reason why the films are important is not only because they are a replacement for religion. Instead, they are an integrated component of popular memory. Johnson and Oh have underestimated the influence of pop culture as "the new religion" (14). It is not a form of cheap grace. The history of ideas is neither linear nor traceable. There is no clear path from Plato to Prozac or Moses to Mogadon. Obi-Wan Kenobi is not a personal trainer for the ailing spirituality of our age. It was Ewan McGregor who fulfilled the Xer dream to be the young Obi Wan. As he has stated, "there is nothing cooler than being a Jedi knight" (qtd. in Grant 15). Having survived feet sawing in Shallow Grave and a painfully large enema in Trainspotting, there are few actors who are better prepared to carry the iconographic burden of a Star Wars prequel. Born in 1971, he is the Molly Ringwall of the 1990s. There is something delicious about the new Obi Wan, that hails what Hicks described as "a sense of awareness and self- awareness, of detached observation, of not taking things seriously, and a use of subtle dry humour" (79). The metaphoric light sabre was passed to McGregor. The pull of the dark side. When fans attend The Phantom Menace, they tend to the past, as to a loved garden. Whether this memory is a monument or a ruin depends on the preservation of the analogue world in the digital realm. The most significant theoretical and discursive task in the present is to disrupt the dual ideologies punctuating the contemporary era: inevitable technological change and progress.4 Only then may theorists ponder the future of a digitised past. Disempowered groups, who were denied a voice and role in the analogue history of the twentieth century, will have inequalities reified and reinforced through the digital archiving of contemporary life. The Web has been pivotal to the new Star Wars film. Lucasfilm has an Internet division and an official Website. Between mid November and May, this site has been accessed twenty million times (Gallott 15). Other sites, such as TheForce.net and Countdown to Star Wars, are a record of the enthusiasm and passion of fans. As Daniel Fallon and Matthew Buchanan have realised, "these sites represent the ultimate in film fandom -- virtual communities where like-minded enthusiasts can bathe in the aura generated by their favourite masterpiece" (27). Screensavers, games, desktop wallpaper, interviews and photo galleries have been downloaded and customised. Some ephemeral responses to The Phantom Menace have been digitally recorded. Yet this moment of audience affectivity will be lost without a consideration of digital memory. The potentials and problems of the digital and analogue environments need to be oriented into critical theories of information, knowledge, entertainment and pleasure. The binary language of computer-mediated communication allows a smooth transference of data. Knowledge and meaning systems are not exchanged as easily. Classifying, organising and preserving information make it useful. Archival procedures have been both late and irregular in their application.5 Bocher and Ihlenfeldt assert that 2500 new web sites are coming on-line every day ("A Higher Signal-to-Noise Ratio"). The difficulties and problems confronting librarians and archivists who wish to preserve digital information is revealed in the Australian government's PADI (Preserving Access to Digital Information) Site. Compared with an object in a museum which may lie undisturbed for years in a storeroom, or a book on a shelf, or even Egyptian hieroglyd on the wall of a tomb, digital information requires much more active maintenance. If we want access to digital information in the future, we must plan and act now. (PADI, "Why Preserve Access to Digital Information?") phics carve The speed of digitisation means that responsibility for preserving cultural texts, and the skills necessary to enact this process, is increasing the pressure facing information professionals. An even greater difficulty when preserving digital information is what to keep, and what to release to the ephemeral winds of cyberspace. 'Qualitative criteria' construct an historical record that restates the ideologies of the powerful. Concerns with quality undermine the voices of the disempowered, displaced and decentred. The media's instability through technological obsolescence adds a time imperative that is absent from other archival discussions.6 While these problems have always taken place in the analogue world, there was a myriad of alternative sites where ephemeral material was stored, such as the family home. Popular cultural information will suffer most from the 'blind spots' of digital archivists. While libraries rarely preserve the ephemera of a time, many homes (including mine) preserve the 'trash' of a culture. A red light sabre, toy dalek, Duran Duran posters and a talking Undertaker are all traces of past obsessions and fandoms. Passion evaporates, and interests morph into new trends. These objects remain in attics, under beds, in boxes and sheds throughout the world. Digital documents necessitate a larger project of preservation, with great financial (and spatial) commitments of technology, software and maintenance. Libraries rarely preserve the ephemera -- the texture and light -- of the analogue world. The digital era reduces the number of fan-based archivists. Subsequently forfeited is the spectrum of interests and ideologies that construct the popular memory of a culture. Once bits replace atoms, the recorded world becomes structured by digital codes. Only particular texts will be significant enough to store digitally. Samuel Florman stated that "in the digital age nothing need be lost; do we face the prospect of drowning in trivia as the generations succeed each other?" (n. pag.) The trivia of academics may be the fodder (and pleasures) of everyday life. Digitised preservation, like analogue preservation, can never 'represent' plural paths through the past. There is always a limit and boundary to what is acceptable obsolescence. The Star Wars films suggests that "the whole palette of digital technology is much more subtle and supple; if you can dream it, you can see it" (Corliss 65). This film will also record how many of the dreams survive and are archived. Films, throughout the century, have changed the way in which we construct and remember the past. They convey an expressive memory, rather than an accurate history. Certainly, Star Wars is only a movie. Yet, as Rushkoff has suggested, "we have developed a new language of references and self-references that identify media as a real thing and media history as an actual social history" (32). The build up in Australia to The Phantom Menace has been wilfully joyful. This is a history of the present, a time which I know will, in retrospect, be remembered with great fondness. It is a collective event for a generation, but it speaks to us all in different ways. At ten, it is easy to be amazed and enthralled at popular culture. By thirty, it is more difficult. When we see Star Wars, we go back to visit our memories. With red light sabre in hand, we splice through time, as much as space. Footnotes The United States release of the film occurred on 19 May 1999. In Australia, the film's first screenings were on 3 June. Many cinemas showed The Phantom Menace at 12:01 am, (very) early Thursday morning. The three main players of the GNW team, Paul McDermott, Mikey Robbins and Julie McCrossin, were featured on the cover of Australia's Juice magazine in costumes from The Phantom Menace, being Obi-Wan, Yoda and Queen Amidala respectively. Actually, the National Air and Space Museum had a Star Wars exhibition in 1997, titled "Star Wars: The Magic of Myth". For example, Janet Collins, Michael Hammond and Jerry Wellington, in Teaching and Learning with the Media, stated that "the message is simple: we now have the technology to inform, entertain and educate. Miss it and you, your family and your school will be left behind" (3). Herb Brody described the Net as "an overstuffed, underorganised attic full of pictures and documents that vary wildly in value", in "Wired Science". The interesting question is, whose values will predominate when the attic is being cleared and sorted? This problem is extended because the statutory provision of legal deposit, which obliges publishers to place copies of publications in the national library of the country in which the item is published, does not include CD-ROMs or software. References Bocher, Bob, and Kay Ihlenfeldt. "A Higher Signal-to-Noise Ratio: Effective Use of WebSearch Engines." State of Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Website. 13 Mar. 1998. 15 June 1999 <http://www.dpi.state.wi.us/dpi/dlcl/lbstat/search2.php>. Brody, Herb. "Wired Science." Technology Review Oct. 1996. 15 June 1999 <http://www.techreview.com/articles/oct96/brody.php>. Carter, Timothy. "Wars Weary." Cinescape 39 (Mar./Apr. 1999): 9. Collins, Janet, Michael Hammond, and Jerry Wellington. Teaching and Learning with Multimedia. London: Routledge, 1997. Corliss, Richard. "Ready, Set, Glow!" Time 18 (3 May 1999): 65. Count Down to Star Wars. 1999. 15 June 1999 <http://starwars.countingdown.com/>. Coupland, Douglas. Generation X. London: Abacus, 1991. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyper-Reality. London: Picador, 1987. Fallon, Daniel, and Matthew Buchanan. "Now Screening." Australian Net Guide 4.5 (June 1999): 27. Florman, Samuel. "From Here to Eternity." MIT's Technology Review 100.3 (Apr. 1997). Gallott, Kirsten. "May the Web Be with you." Who Weekly 24 May 1999: 15. Grant, Fiona. "Ewan's Star Soars!" TV Week 29 May - 4 June 1999: 15. Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson, eds. Resistance through Rituals. London: Hutchinson, 1976. Harris, David. From Class Struggle to the Politics of Pleasure: the Effects of Gramscianism on Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1992. Hebdige, Dick. Hiding in the Light. London: Routledge, 1988. Hopkins, Susan. "Generation Pulp." Youth Studies Australia Spring 1995. Johnson, Brian, and Susan Oh. "The Second Coming: as the Newest Star Wars Film Illustrates, Pop Culture Has Become a New Religion." Maclean's 24 May 1999: 14-8. Juice 78 (June 1999). Kizlik, Robert. "Generation X Wants to Teach." International Journal of Instructional Media 26.2 (Spring 1999). Lucasfilm Ltd. Star Wars: Welcome to the Official Site. 1999. 15 June 1999 <http://www.starwars.com/>. Miller, Nick. "Generation X-Wing Fighter." The West Australian 4 June 1999: 9. PADI. "What Digital Information Should be Preserved? Appraisal and Selection." Preserving Access to Digital Information (PADI) Website. 11 March 1999. 15 June 1999 <http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/what.php>. PADI. "Why Preserve Access to Digital Information?" Preserving Access to Digital Information (PADI) Website. <http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/why.php>. Rushkoff, Douglas. Media Virus. Sydney: Random House, 1994. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Tara Brabazon. "A Red Light Sabre to Go, and Other Histories of the Present." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.4 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/sabre.php>. Chicago style: Tara Brabazon, "A Red Light Sabre to Go, and Other Histories of the Present," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 4 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/sabre.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Tara Brabazon. (1999) A red light sabre to go, and other histories of the present. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(4). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/sabre.php> ([your date of access]).

The academic journal is obsolete. In a world where there are more titles than ever, this is a comment on their form – especially the print journal – rather than their quantity. Now that you can get everything online, it doesn’t really matter what journal a paper appears in; certainly it doesn’t matter what’s in the same issue. The experience of a journal is rapidly obsolescing, for both editors and readers. I’m obviously not the first person to notice this (see, for instance, "Scholarly Communication"; "Transforming Scholarly Communication"; Houghton; Policy Perspectives; Teute), but I do have a personal stake in the process. For if the journal is obsolete then it follows that the editor is obsolete, and I am the editor of the International Journal of Cultural Studies. I founded the IJCS and have been sole editor ever since. Next year will see the fiftieth issue. So far, I have been responsible for over 280 published articles – over 2.25 million words of other people’s scholarship … and counting. We won’t say anything about the words that did not get published, except that the IJCS rejection rate is currently 87 per cent. Perhaps the first point that needs to be made, then, is that obsolescence does not imply lack of success. By any standard the IJCS is a successful journal, and getting more so. It has recently been assessed as a top-rating A* journal in the Australian Research Council’s journal rankings for ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia), the newly activated research assessment exercise. (In case you’re wondering, M/C Journal is rated B.) The ARC says of the ranking exercise: ‘The lists are a result of consultations with the sector and rigorous review by leading researchers and the ARC.’ The ARC definition of an A* journal is given as: Typically an A* journal would be one of the best in its field or subfield in which to publish and would typically cover the entire field/ subfield. Virtually all papers they publish will be of very high quality. These are journals where most of the work is important (it will really shape the field) and where researchers boast about getting accepted.Acceptance rates would typically be low and the editorial board would be dominated by field leaders, including many from top institutions. (Appendix I, p. 21; and see p. 4.)Talking of boasting, I love to prate about the excellent people we’ve published in the IJCS. We have introduced new talent to the field, and we have published new work by some of its pioneers – including Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall. We’ve also published – among many others – Sara Ahmed, Mohammad Amouzadeh, Tony Bennett, Goran Bolin, Charlotte Brunsdon, William Boddy, Nico Carpentier, Stephen Coleman, Nick Couldry, Sean Cubitt, Michael Curtin, Daniel Dayan, Ben Dibley, Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, John Frow, Elfriede Fursich, Christine Geraghty, Mark Gibson, Paul Gilroy, Faye Ginsberg, Jonathan Gray, Lawrence Grossberg, Judith Halberstam, Hanno Hardt, Gay Hawkins, Joke Hermes, Su Holmes, Desmond Hui, Fred Inglis, Henry Jenkins, Deborah Jermyn, Ariel Heryanto, Elihu Katz, Senator Rod Kemp (Australian government minister), Youna Kim, Agnes Ku, Richard E. Lee, Jeff Lewis, David Lodge (the novelist), Knut Lundby, Eric Ma, Anna McCarthy, Divya McMillin, Antonio Menendez-Alarcon, Toby Miller, Joe Moran, Chris Norris, John Quiggin, Chris Rojek, Jane Roscoe, Jeffrey Sconce, Lynn Spigel, John Storey, Su Tong, the late Sako Takeshi, Sue Turnbull, Graeme Turner, William Uricchio, José van Dijck, Georgette Wang, Jing Wang, Elizabeth Wilson, Janice Winship, Handel Wright, Wu Jing, Wu Qidi (Chinese Vice-Minister of Education), Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh, Robert Young and Zhao Bin. As this partial list makes clear, as well as publishing the top ‘hegemons’ we also publish work pointing in new directions, including papers from neighbouring disciplines such as anthropology, area studies, economics, education, feminism, history, literary studies, philosophy, political science, and sociology. We have sought to represent neglected regions, especially Chinese cultural studies, which has grown strongly during the past decade. And for quite a few up-and-coming scholars we’ve been the proud host of their first international publication. The IJCS was first published in 1998, already well into the internet era, but it was print-only at that time. Since then, all content, from volume 1:1 onwards, has been digitised and is available online (although vol 1:2 is unaccountably missing). The publishers, Sage Publications Ltd, London, have steadily added online functionality, so that now libraries can get the journal in various packages, including offering this title among many others in online-only bundles, and individuals can purchase single articles online. Thus, in addition to institutional and individual subscriptions, which remain the core business of the journal, income is derived by the publisher from multi-site licensing, incremental consortial sales income, single- and back-issue sales (print), pay-per-view, and deep back file sales (electronic). So what’s obsolete about it? In that boasting paragraph of mine (above), about what wonderful authors we’ve published, lies one of the seeds of obsolescence. For now that it is available online, ‘users’ (no longer ‘readers’!) can search for what they want and ignore the journal as such altogether. This is presumably how most active researchers experience any journal – they are looking for articles (or less: quotations; data; references) relevant to a given topic, literature review, thesis etc. They encounter a journal online through its ‘content’ rather than its ‘form.’ The latter is irrelevant to them, and may as well not exist. The Cover Some losses are associated with this change. First is the loss of the front cover. Now you, dear reader, scrolling through this article online, might well complain, why all the fuss about covers? Internet-generation journals don’t have covers, so all of the work that goes into them to establish the brand, the identity and even the ‘affect’ of a journal is now, well, obsolete. So let me just remind you of what’s at stake. Editors, designers and publishers all take a good deal of trouble over covers, since they are the point of intersection of editorial, design and marketing priorities. Thus, the IJCS cover contains the only ‘content’ of the journal for which we pay a fee to designers and photographers (usually the publisher pays, but in one case I did). Like any other cover, ours has three main elements: title, colour and image. Thought goes into every detail. Title I won’t say anything about the journal’s title as such, except that it was the result of protracted discussions (I suggested Terra Nullius at one point, but Sage weren’t having any of that). The present concern is with how a title looks on a cover. Our title-typeface is Frutiger. Originally designed by Adrian Frutiger for Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, it is suitably international, being used for the corporate identity of the UK National Health Service, Telefónica O2, the Royal Navy, the London School of Economics , the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Conservative Party of Canada, Banco Bradesco of Brazil, the Finnish Defence Forces and on road signs in Switzerland (Wikipedia, "Frutiger"). Frutiger is legible, informal, and reads well in small copy. Sage’s designer and I corresponded on which of the words in our cumbersome name were most important, agreeing that ‘international’ combined with ‘cultural’ is the USP (Unique Selling Point) of the journal, so they should be picked out (in bold small-caps) from the rest of the title, which the designer presented in a variety of Frutiger fonts (regular, italic, and reversed – white on black), presumably to signify the dynamism and diversity of our content. The word ‘studies’ appears on a lozenge-shaped cartouche that is also used as a design element throughout the journal, for bullet points, titles and keywords. Colour We used to change this every two years, but since volume 7 it has stabilised with the distinctive Pantone 247, ‘new fuchsia.’ This colour arose from my own environment at QUT, where it was chosen (by me) for the new Creative Industries Faculty’s academic gowns and hoods, and thence as a detailing colour for the otherwise monochrome Creative Industries Precinct buildings. There’s a lot of it around my office, including on the wall and the furniture. New Fuchsia is – we are frequently told – a somewhat ‘girly’ colour, especially when contrasted with the Business Faculty’s blue or Law’s silver; its similarity to the Girlfriend/Dolly palette does introduce a mild ‘politics of prestige’ element, since it is determinedly pop culture, feminised, and non-canonical. Image Right at the start, the IJCS set out to signal its difference from other journals. At that time, all Sage journals had calligraphic colours – but I was insistent that we needed a photograph (I have ‘form’ in this respect: in 1985 I changed the cover of the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies from a line drawing (albeit by Sydney Nolan) to a photograph; and I co-designed the photo-cover of Cultural Studies in 1987). For IJCS I knew which photo I wanted, and Sage went along with the choice. I explained it in the launch issue’s editorial (Hartley, "Editorial"). That original picture, a goanna on a cattle grid in the outback, by Australian photographer Grant Hobson, lasted ten years. Since volume 11 – in time for our second decade – the goanna has been replaced with a picture by Italian-based photographer Patrick Nicholas, called ‘Reality’ (Hartley, "Cover Narrative"). We have also used two other photos as cover images, once each. They are: Daniel Meadows’s 1974 ‘Karen & Barbara’ (Hartley, "Who"); and a 1962 portrait of Richard Hoggart from the National Portrait Gallery in London (Owen & Hartley 2007). The choice of picture has involved intense – sometimes very tense – negotiations with Sage. Most recently, they were adamant the Daniel Meadows picture, which I wanted to use as the long-term replacement of the goanna, was too ‘English’ and they would not accept it. We exchanged rather sharp words before compromising. There’s no need to rehearse the dispute here; the point is that both sides, publisher and editor, felt that vital interests were at stake in the choice of a cover-image. Was it too obscure; too Australian; too English; too provocative (the current cover features, albeit in the deep background, a TV screen-shot of a topless Italian game-show contestant)? Running Order Beyond the cover, the next obsolete feature of a journal is the running order of articles. Obviously what goes in the journal is contingent upon what has been submitted and what is ready at a given time, so this is a creative role within a very limited context, which is what makes it pleasurable. Out of a limited number of available papers, a choice must be made about which one goes first, what order the other papers should follow, and which ones must be held over to the next issue. The first priority is to choose the lead article: like the ‘first face’ in a fashion show (if you don’t know what I mean by that, see FTV.com. It sets the look, the tone, and the standard for the issue. I always choose articles I like for this slot. It sends a message to the field – look at this! Next comes the running order. We have about six articles per issue. It is important to maintain the IJCS’s international mix, so I check for the country of origin, or failing that (since so many articles come from Anglosphere countries like the USA, UK and Australia), the location of the analysis. Attention also has to be paid to the gender balance among authors, and to the mix of senior and emergent scholars. Sometimes a weak article needs to be ‘hammocked’ between two good ones (these are relative terms – everything published in the IJCS is of a high scholarly standard). And we need to think about disciplinary mix, so as not to let the journal stray too far towards one particular methodological domain. Running order is thus a statement about the field – the disciplinary domain – rather than about an individual paper. It is a proposition about how different voices connect together in some sort of disciplinary syntax. One might even claim that the combination of cover and running order is a last vestige of collegiate collectivism in an era of competitive academic individualism. Now all that matters is the individual paper and author; the ‘currency’ is tenure, promotion and research metrics, not relations among peers. The running order is obsolete. Special Issues An extreme version of running order is the special issue. The IJCS has regularly published these; they are devoted to field-shaping initiatives, as follows: Title Editor(s) Issue Date Radiocracy: Radio, Development and Democracy Amanda Hopkinson, Jo Tacchi 3.2 2000 Television and Cultural Studies Graeme Turner 4.4 2001 Cultural Studies and Education Karl Maton, Handel Wright 5.4 2002 Re-Imagining Communities Sara Ahmed, Anne-Marie Fortier 6.3 2003 The New Economy, Creativity and Consumption John Hartley 7.1 2004 Creative Industries and Innovation in China Michael Keane, John Hartley 9.3 2006 The Uses of Richard Hoggart Sue Owen, John Hartley 10.1 2007 A Cultural History of Celebrity Liz Barry 11.3 2008 Caribbean Media Worlds Anna Pertierra, Heather Horst 12.2 2009 Co-Creative Labour Mark Deuze, John Banks 12.5 2009 It’s obvious that special issues have a place in disciplinary innovation – they can draw attention in a timely manner to new problems, neglected regions, or innovative approaches, and thus they advance the field. They are indispensible. But because of online publication, readers are not held to the ‘project’ of a special issue and can pick and choose whatever they want. And because of the peculiarities of research assessment exercises, editing special issues doesn’t count as research output. The incentive to do them is to that extent reduced, and some universities are quite heavy-handed about letting academics ‘waste’ time on activities that don’t produce ‘metrics.’ The special issue is therefore threatened with obsolescence too. Refereeing In many top-rating journals, the human side of refereeing is becoming obsolete. Increasingly this labour-intensive chore is automated and the labour is technologically outsourced from editors and publishers to authors and referees. You have to log on to some website and follow prompts in order to contribute both papers and the assessment of papers; interactions with editors are minimal. At the IJCS the process is still handled by humans – namely, journal administrator Tina Horton and me. We spend a lot of time checking how papers are faring, from trying to find the right referees through to getting the comments and then the author’s revisions completed in time for a paper to be scheduled into an issue. The volume of email correspondence is considerable. We get to know authors and referees. So we maintain a sense of an interactive and conversational community, albeit by correspondence rather than face to face. Doubtless, sooner or later, there will be a depersonalised Text Management System. But in the meantime we cling to the romantic notion that we are involved in refereeing for the sake of the field, for raising the standard of scholarship, for building a globally dispersed virtual college of cultural studies, and for giving everyone – from unfavoured countries and neglected regions to famous professors in old-money universities – the same chance to get their research published. In fact, these are largely delusional ideals, for as everyone knows, refereeing is part of the political economy of publicly-funded research. It’s about academic credentials, tenure and promotion for the individual, and about measurable research metrics for the academic organisation or funding agency (Hartley, "Death"). The IJCS has no choice but to participate: we do what is required to qualify as a ‘double-blind refereed journal’ because that is the only way to maintain repute, and thence the flow of submissions, not to mention subscriptions, without which there would be no journal. As with journals themselves, which proliferate even as the print form becomes obsolete, so refereeing is burgeoning as a practice. It’s almost an industry, even though the currency is not money but time: part gift-economy; part attention-economy; partly the payment of dues to the suzerain funding agencies. But refereeing is becoming obsolete in the sense of gathering an ‘imagined community’ of people one might expect to know personally around a particular enterprise. The process of dispersal and anonymisation of the field is exacerbated by blind refereeing, which we do because we must. This is suited to a scientific domain of objective knowledge, but everyone knows it’s not quite like that in the ‘new humanities’. The agency and identity of the researcher is often a salient fact in the research. The embedded positionality of the author, their reflexiveness about their own context and room-for-manoeuvre, and the radical contextuality of knowledge itself – these are all more or less axiomatic in cultural studies, but they’re not easily served by ‘double-blind’ refereeing. When refereeing is depersonalised to the extent that is now rife (especially in journals owned by international commercial publishers), it is hard to maintain a sense of contextualised productivity in the knowledge domain, much less a ‘common cause’ to which both author and referee wish to contribute. Even though refereeing can still be seen as altruistic, it is in the service of something much more general (‘scholarship’) and much more particular (‘my career’) than the kind of reviewing that wants to share and improve a particular intellectual enterprise. It is this mid-range altruism – something that might once have been identified as a politics of knowledge – that’s becoming obsolete, along with the printed journals that were the banner and rallying point for the cause. If I were to start a new journal (such as cultural-science.org), I would prefer ‘open refereeing’: uploading papers on an open site, subjecting them to peer-review and criticism, and archiving revised versions once they have received enough votes and comments. In other words I’d like to see refereeing shifted from the ‘supply’ or production side of a journal to the ‘demand’ or readership side. But of course, ‘demand’ for ‘blind’ refereeing doesn’t come from readers; it comes from the funding agencies. The Reading Experience Finally, the experience of reading a journal is obsolete. Two aspects of this seem worthy of note. First, reading is ‘out of time’ – it no longer needs to conform to the rhythms of scholarly publication, which are in any case speeding up. Scholarship is no longer seasonal, as it has been since the Middle Ages (with university terms organised around agricultural and ecclesiastical rhythms). Once you have a paper’s DOI number, you can read it any time, 24/7. It is no longer necessary even to wait for publication. With some journals in our field (e.g. Journalism Studies), assuming your Library subscribes, you can access papers as soon as they’re uploaded on the journal’s website, before the published edition is printed. Soon this will be the norm, just as it is for the top science journals, where timely publication, and thereby the ability to claim first discovery, is the basis of intellectual property rights. The IJCS doesn’t (yet) offer this service, but its frequency is speeding up. It was launched in 1998 with three issues a year. It went quarterly in 2001 and remained a quarterly for eight years. It has recently increased to six issues a year. That too causes changes in the reading experience. The excited ripping open of the package is less of a thrill the more often it arrives. Indeed, how many subscribers will admit that sometimes they don’t even open the envelope? Second, reading is ‘out of place’ – you never have to see the journal in which a paper appears, so you can avoid contact with anything that you haven’t already decided to read. This is more significant than might first appear, because it is affecting journalism in general, not just academic journals. As we move from the broadcast to the broadband era, communicative usage is shifting too, from ‘mass’ communication to customisation. This is a mixed blessing. One of the pleasures of old-style newspapers and the TV news was that you’d come across stories you did not expect to find. Indeed, an important attribute of the industrial form of journalism is its success in getting whole populations to read or watch stories about things they aren’t interested in, or things like wars and crises that they’d rather not know about at all. That historic textual achievement is in jeopardy in the broadband era, because ‘the public’ no longer needs to gather around any particular masthead or bulletin to get their news. With Web 2.0 affordances, you can exercise much more choice over what you attend to. This is great from the point of view of maximising individual choice, but sub-optimal in relation to what I’ve called ‘population-gathering’, especially the gathering of communities of interest around ‘tales of the unexpected’ – novelty or anomalies. Obsolete: Collegiality, Trust and Innovation? The individuation of reading choices may stimulate prejudice, because prejudice (literally, ‘pre-judging’) is built in when you decide only to access news feeds about familiar topics, stories or people in which you’re already interested. That sort of thing may encourage narrow-mindedness. It is certainly an impediment to chance discovery, unplanned juxtaposition, unstructured curiosity and thence, perhaps, to innovation itself. This is a worry for citizenship in general, but it is also an issue for academic ‘knowledge professionals,’ in our ever-narrower disciplinary silos. An in-close specialist focus on one’s own area of expertise need no longer be troubled by the concerns of the person in the next office, never mind the next department. Now, we don’t even have to meet on the page. One of the advantages of whole journals, then, is that each issue encourages ‘macro’ as well as ‘micro’ perspectives, and opens reading up to surprises. This willingness to ‘take things on trust’ describes a ‘we’ community – a community of trust. Trust too is obsolete in these days of performance evaluation. We’re assessed by an anonymous system that’s managed by people we’ll never meet. If the ‘population-gathering’ aspects of print journals are indeed obsolete, this may reduce collegiate trust and fellow-feeling, increase individualist competitiveness, and inhibit innovation. In the face of that prospect, I’m going to keep on thinking about covers, running orders, referees and reading until the role of editor is obsolete too. ReferencesHartley, John. "'Cover Narrative': From Nightmare to Reality." International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.2 (2005): 131-137. ———. "Death of the Book?" Symposium of the National Scholarly Communication Forum & Australian Academy of the Humanities, Sydney Maritime Museum, 2005. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.humanities.org.au/Resources/Downloads/NSCF/RoundTables1-17/PDF/Hartley.pdf›. ———. "Editorial: With Goanna." International Journal of Cultural Studies 1.1 (1998): 5-10. ———. "'Who Are You Going to Believe – Me or Your Own Eyes?' New Decade; New Directions." International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.1 (2008): 5-14. Houghton, John. "Economics of Scholarly Communication: A Discussion Paper." Center for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University, 2000. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.caul.edu.au/cisc/EconomicsScholarlyCommunication.pdf›. Owen, Sue, and John Hartley, eds. The Uses of Richard Hoggart. International Journal of Cultural Studies (special issue), 10.1 (2007). Policy Perspectives: To Publish and Perish. (Special issue cosponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, Association of American Universities and the Pew Higher Education Roundtable) 7.4 (1998). 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.arl.org/scomm/pew/pewrept.html›. "Scholarly Communication: Crisis and Revolution." University of California Berkeley Library. N.d. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/Collections/crisis.html›. Teute, F. J. "To Publish or Perish: Who Are the Dinosaurs in Scholarly Publishing?" Journal of Scholarly Publishing 32.2 (2001). 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.utpjournals.com/product/jsp/322/perish5.html›."Transforming Scholarly Communication." University of Houston Library. 2005. 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://info.lib.uh.edu/scomm/transforming.htm›.

At one point in Victor Hugo’s novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the archdeacon, Claude Frollo, looked up from a book on his table to the edifice of the gothic cathedral, visible from his canon’s cell in the cloister of Notre Dame: “Alas!” he said, “this will kill that” (146). Frollo’s lament, that the book would destroy the edifice, captures the medieval cleric’s anxiety about the way in which Gutenberg’s print technology would become the new universal means for recording and communicating humanity’s ideas and artistic expression, replacing the grand monuments of architecture, human engineering, and craftsmanship. For Hugo, architecture was “the great handwriting of humankind” (149). The cathedral as the material outcome of human technology was being replaced by the first great machine—the printing press. At this point in the third millennium, some people undoubtedly have similar anxieties to Frollo: is it now the book’s turn to be destroyed by yet another great machine? The inclusion of “post print” in our title is not intended to sound the death knell of the book. Rather, we contend that despite the enduring value of print, digital publishing is “present and active” and is changing the way in which research, particularly in the humanities, is being undertaken. Our approach has three related parts. First, we consider how digital technologies are changing the way in which content is constructed, customised, modified, disseminated, and accessed within a global, distributed network. This section argues that the transition from print to electronic or digital publishing means both losses and gains, particularly with respect to shifts in our approaches to textuality, information, and innovative publishing. Second, we discuss the Children’s Literature Digital Resources (CLDR) project, with which we are involved. This case study of a digitising initiative opens out the transformative possibilities and challenges of digital publishing and e-scholarship for research communities. Third, we reflect on technology’s capacity to bring about major changes in the light of the theoretical and practical issues that have arisen from our discussion. I. Digitising in a “post-print age” We are living in an era that is commonly referred to as “the late age of print” (see Kho) or the “post-print age” (see Gunkel). According to Aarseth, we have reached a point whereby nearly all of our public and personal media have become more or less digital (37). As Kho notes, web newspapers are not only becoming increasingly more popular, but they are also making rather than losing money, and paper-based newspapers are finding it difficult to recruit new readers from the younger generations (37). Not only can such online-only publications update format, content, and structure more economically than print-based publications, but their wide distribution network, speed, and flexibility attract advertising revenue. Hype and hyperbole aside, publishers are not so much discarding their legacy of print, but recognising the folly of not embracing innovative technologies that can add value by presenting information in ways that satisfy users’ needs for content to-go or for edutainment. As Kho notes: “no longer able to satisfy customer demand by producing print-only products, or even by enabling online access to semi-static content, established publishers are embracing new models for publishing, web-style” (42). Advocates of online publishing contend that the major benefits of online publishing over print technology are that it is faster, more economical, and more interactive. However, as Hovav and Gray caution, “e-publishing also involves risks, hidden costs, and trade-offs” (79). The specific focus for these authors is e-journal publishing and they contend that while cost reduction is in editing, production and distribution, if the journal is not open access, then costs relating to storage and bandwith will be transferred to the user. If we put economics aside for the moment, the transition from print to electronic text (e-text), especially with electronic literary works, brings additional considerations, particularly in their ability to make available different reading strategies to print, such as “animation, rollovers, screen design, navigation strategies, and so on” (Hayles 38). Transition from print to e-text In his book, Writing Space, David Bolter follows Victor Hugo’s lead, but does not ask if print technology will be destroyed. Rather, he argues that “the idea and ideal of the book will change: print will no longer define the organization and presentation of knowledge, as it has for the past five centuries” (2). As Hayles noted above, one significant indicator of this change, which is a consequence of the shift from analogue to digital, is the addition of graphical, audio, visual, sonic, and kinetic elements to the written word. A significant consequence of this transition is the reinvention of the book in a networked environment. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is not bound by space and time. Rather, it is an evolving entity within an ecology of readers, authors, and texts. The Web 2.0 platform has enabled more experimentation with blending of digital technology and traditional writing, particularly in the use of blogs, which have spawned blogwriting and the wikinovel. Siva Vaidhyanathan’s The Googlization of Everything: How One Company is Disrupting Culture, Commerce and Community … and Why We Should Worry is a wikinovel or blog book that was produced over a series of weeks with contributions from other bloggers (see: http://www.sivacracy.net/). Penguin Books, in collaboration with a media company, “Six Stories to Start,” have developed six stories—“We Tell Stories,” which involve different forms of interactivity from users through blog entries, Twitter text messages, an interactive google map, and other features. For example, the story titled “Fairy Tales” allows users to customise the story using their own choice of names for characters and descriptions of character traits. Each story is loosely based on a classic story and links take users to synopses of these original stories and their authors and to online purchase of the texts through the Penguin Books sales website. These examples of digital stories are a small part of the digital environment, which exploits computer and online technologies’ capacity to be interactive and immersive. As Janet Murray notes, the interactive qualities of digital environments are characterised by their procedural and participatory abilities, while their immersive qualities are characterised by their spatial and encyclopedic dimensions (71–89). These immersive and interactive qualities highlight different ways of reading texts, which entail different embodied and cognitive functions from those that reading print texts requires. As Hayles argues: the advent of electronic textuality presents us with an unparalleled opportunity to reformulate fundamental ideas about texts and, in the process, to see print as well as electronic texts with fresh eyes (89–90). The transition to e-text also highlights how digitality is changing all aspects of everyday life both inside and outside the academy. Online teaching and e-research Another aspect of the commercial arm of publishing that is impacting on academe and other organisations is the digitising and indexing of print content for niche distribution. Kho offers the example of the Mark Logic Corporation, which uses its XML content platform to repurpose content, create new content, and distribute this content through multiple portals. As the promotional website video for Mark Logic explains, academics can use this service to customise their own textbooks for students by including only articles and book chapters that are relevant to their subject. These are then organised, bound, and distributed by Mark Logic for sale to students at a cost that is generally cheaper than most textbooks. A further example of how print and digital materials can form an integrated, customised source for teachers and students is eFictions (Trimmer, Jennings, & Patterson). eFictions was one of the first print and online short story anthologies that teachers of literature could customise to their own needs. Produced as both a print text collection and a website, eFictions offers popular short stories in English by well-known traditional and contemporary writers from the US, Australia, New Zealand, UK, and Europe, with summaries, notes on literary features, author biographies, and, in one instance, a YouTube movie of the story. In using the eFictions website, teachers can build a customised anthology of traditional and innovative stories to suit their teaching preferences. These examples provide useful indicators of how content is constructed, customised, modified, disseminated, and accessed within a distributed network. However, the question remains as to how to measure their impact and outcomes within teaching and learning communities. As Harley suggests in her study on the use and users of digital resources in the humanities and social sciences, several factors warrant attention, such as personal teaching style, philosophy, and specific disciplinary requirements. However, in terms of understanding the benefits of digital resources for teaching and learning, Harley notes that few providers in her sample had developed any plans to evaluate use and users in a systematic way. In addition to the problems raised in Harley’s study, another relates to how researchers can be supported to take full advantage of digital technologies for e-research. The transformation brought about by information and communication technologies extends and broadens the impact of research, by making its outputs more discoverable and usable by other researchers, and its benefits more available to industry, governments, and the wider community. Traditional repositories of knowledge and information, such as libraries, are juggling the space demands of books and computer hardware alongside increasing reader demand for anywhere, anytime, anyplace access to information. Researchers’ expectations about online access to journals, eprints, bibliographic data, and the views of others through wikis, blogs, and associated social and information networking sites such as YouTube compete with the traditional expectations of the institutions that fund libraries for paper-based archives and book repositories. While university libraries are finding it increasingly difficult to purchase all hardcover books relevant to numerous and varied disciplines, a significant proportion of their budgets goes towards digital repositories (e.g., STORS), indexes, and other resources, such as full-text electronic specialised and multidisciplinary journal databases (e.g., Project Muse and Proquest); electronic serials; e-books; and specialised information sources through fast (online) document delivery services. An area that is becoming increasingly significant for those working in the humanities is the digitising of historical and cultural texts. II. Bringing back the dead: The CLDR project The CLDR project is led by researchers and librarians at the Queensland University of Technology, in collaboration with Deakin University, University of Sydney, and members of the AustLit team at The University of Queensland. The CLDR project is a “Research Community” of the electronic bibliographic database AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource, which is working towards the goal of providing a complete bibliographic record of the nation’s literature. AustLit offers users with a single entry point to enhanced scholarly resources on Australian writers, their works, and other aspects of Australian literary culture and activities. AustLit and its Research Communities are supported by grants from the Australian Research Council and financial and in-kind contributions from a consortium of Australian universities, and by other external funding sources such as the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. Like other more extensive digitisation projects, such as Project Gutenberg and the Rosetta Project, the CLDR project aims to provide a centralised access point for digital surrogates of early published works of Australian children’s literature, with access pathways to existing resources. The first stage of the CLDR project is to provide access to digitised, full-text, out-of-copyright Australian children’s literature from European settlement to 1945, with selected digitised critical works relevant to the field. Texts comprise a range of genres, including poetry, drama, and narrative for young readers and picture books, songs, and rhymes for infants. Currently, a selection of 75 e-texts and digital scans of original texts from Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive have been linked to the Children’s Literature Research Community. By the end of 2009, the CLDR will have digitised approximately 1000 literary texts and a significant number of critical works. Stage II and subsequent development will involve digitisation of selected texts from 1945 onwards. A precursor to the CLDR project has been undertaken by Deakin University in collaboration with the State Library of Victoria, whereby a digital bibliographic index comprising Victorian School Readers has been completed with plans for full-text digital surrogates of a selection of these texts. These texts provide valuable insights into citizenship, identity, and values formation from the 1930s onwards. At the time of writing, the CLDR is at an early stage of development. An extensive survey of out-of-copyright texts has been completed and the digitisation of these resources is about to commence. The project plans to make rich content searchable, allowing scholars from children’s literature studies and education to benefit from the many advantages of online scholarship. What digital publishing and associated digital archives, electronic texts, hypermedia, and so forth foreground is the fact that writers, readers, publishers, programmers, designers, critics, booksellers, teachers, and copyright laws operate within a context that is highly mediated by technology. In his article on large-scale digitisation projects carried out by Cornell and University of Michigan with the Making of America collection of 19th-century American serials and monographs, Hirtle notes that when special collections’ materials are available via the Web, with appropriate metadata and software, then they can “increase use of the material, contribute to new forms of research, and attract new users to the material” (44). Furthermore, Hirtle contends that despite the poor ergonomics associated with most electronic displays and e-book readers, “people will, when given the opportunity, consult an electronic text over the print original” (46). If this preference is universally accurate, especially for researchers and students, then it follows that not only will the preference for electronic surrogates of original material increase, but preference for other kinds of electronic texts will also increase. It is with this preference for electronic resources in mind that we approached the field of children’s literature in Australia and asked questions about how future generations of researchers would prefer to work. If electronic texts become the reference of choice for primary as well as secondary sources, then it seems sensible to assume that researchers would prefer to sit at the end of the keyboard than to travel considerable distances at considerable cost to access paper-based print texts in distant libraries and archives. We considered the best means for providing access to digitised primary and secondary, full text material, and digital pathways to existing online resources, particularly an extensive indexing and bibliographic database. Prior to the commencement of the CLDR project, AustLit had already indexed an extensive number of children’s literature. Challenges and dilemmas The CLDR project, even in its early stages of development, has encountered a number of challenges and dilemmas that centre on access, copyright, economic capital, and practical aspects of digitisation, and sustainability. These issues have relevance for digital publishing and e-research. A decision is yet to be made as to whether the digital texts in CLDR will be available on open or closed/tolled access. The preference is for open access. As Hayles argues, copyright is more than a legal basis for intellectual property, as it also entails ideas about authorship, creativity, and the work as an “immaterial mental construct” that goes “beyond the paper, binding, or ink” (144). Seeking copyright permission is therefore only part of the issue. Determining how the item will be accessed is a further matter, particularly as future technologies may impact upon how a digital item is used. In the case of e-journals, the issue of copyright payment structures are evolving towards a collective licensing system, pay-per-view, and other combinations of print and electronic subscription (see Hovav and Gray). For research purposes, digitisation of items for CLDR is not simply a scan and deliver process. Rather it is one that needs to ensure that the best quality is provided and that the item is both accessible and usable by researchers, and sustainable for future researchers. Sustainability is an important consideration and provides a challenge for institutions that host projects such as CLDR. Therefore, items need to be scanned to a high quality and this requires an expensive scanner and personnel costs. Files need to be in a variety of formats for preservation purposes and so that they may be manipulated to be useable in different technologies (for example, Archival Tiff, Tiff, Jpeg, PDF, HTML). Hovav and Gray warn that when technology becomes obsolete, then content becomes unreadable unless backward integration is maintained. The CLDR items will be annotatable given AustLit’s NeAt funded project: Aus-e-Lit. The Aus-e-Lit project will extend and enhance the existing AustLit web portal with data integration and search services, empirical reporting services, collaborative annotation services, and compound object authoring, editing, and publishing services. For users to be able to get the most out of a digital item, it needs to be searchable, either through double keying or OCR (optimal character recognition). The value of CLDR’s contribution The value of the CLDR project lies in its goal to provide a comprehensive, searchable body of texts (fictional and critical) to researchers across the humanities and social sciences. Other projects seem to be intent on putting up as many items as possible to be considered as a first resort for online texts. CLDR is more specific and is not interested in simply generating a presence on the Web. Rather, it is research driven both in its design and implementation, and in its focussed outcomes of assisting academics and students primarily in their e-research endeavours. To this end, we have concentrated on the following: an extensive survey of appropriate texts; best models for file location, distribution, and use; and high standards of digitising protocols. These issues that relate to data storage, digitisation, collections, management, and end-users of data are aligned with the “Development of an Australian Research Data Strategy” outlined in An Australian e-Research Strategy and Implementation Framework (2006). CLDR is not designed to simply replicate resources, as it has a distinct focus, audience, and research potential. In addition, it looks at resources that may be forgotten or are no longer available in reproduction by current publishing companies. Thus, the aim of CLDR is to preserve both the time and a period of Australian history and literary culture. It will also provide users with an accessible repository of rare and early texts written for children. III. Future directions It is now commonplace to recognize that the Web’s role as information provider has changed over the past decade. New forms of “collective intelligence” or “distributed cognition” (Oblinger and Lombardi) are emerging within and outside formal research communities. Technology’s capacity to initiate major cultural, social, educational, economic, political and commercial shifts has conditioned us to expect the “next big thing.” We have learnt to adapt swiftly to the many challenges that online technologies have presented, and we have reaped the benefits. As the examples in this discussion have highlighted, the changes in online publishing and digitisation have provided many material, network, pedagogical, and research possibilities: we teach online units providing students with access to e-journals, e-books, and customized archives of digitised materials; we communicate via various online technologies; we attend virtual conferences; and we participate in e-research through a global, digital network. In other words, technology is deeply engrained in our everyday lives. In returning to Frollo’s concern that the book would destroy architecture, Umberto Eco offers a placatory note: “in the history of culture it has never happened that something has simply killed something else. Something has profoundly changed something else” (n. pag.). Eco’s point has relevance to our discussion of digital publishing. The transition from print to digital necessitates a profound change that impacts on the ways we read, write, and research. As we have illustrated with our case study of the CLDR project, the move to creating digitised texts of print literature needs to be considered within a dynamic network of multiple causalities, emergent technological processes, and complex negotiations through which digital texts are created, stored, disseminated, and used. Technological changes in just the past five years have, in many ways, created an expectation in the minds of people that the future is no longer some distant time from the present. Rather, as our title suggests, the future is both present and active. References Aarseth, Espen. “How we became Postdigital: From Cyberstudies to Game Studies.” Critical Cyber-culture Studies. Ed. David Silver and Adrienne Massanari. New York: New York UP, 2006. 37–46. An Australian e-Research Strategy and Implementation Framework: Final Report of the e-Research Coordinating Committee. Commonwealth of Australia, 2006. Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1991. Eco, Umberto. “The Future of the Book.” 1994. 3 June 2008 ‹http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_future_of_book.html>. Gunkel, David. J. “What's the Matter with Books?” Configurations 11.3 (2003): 277–303. Harley, Diane. “Use and Users of Digital Resources: A Focus on Undergraduate Education in the Humanities and Social Sciences.” Research and Occasional Papers Series. Berkeley: University of California. Centre for Studies in Higher Education. 12 June 2008 ‹http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_future_of_book.html>. Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. Hirtle, Peter B. “The Impact of Digitization on Special Collections in Libraries.” Libraries & Culture 37.1 (2002): 42–52. Hovav, Anat and Paul Gray. “Managing Academic E-journals.” Communications of the ACM 47.4 (2004): 79–82. Hugo, Victor. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Notre-Dame de Paris). Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth editions, 1993. Kho, Nancy D. “The Medium Gets the Message: Post-Print Publishing Models.” EContent 30.6 (2007): 42–48. Oblinger, Diana and Marilyn Lombardi. “Common Knowledge: Openness in Higher Education.” Opening up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education Through Open Technology, Open Content and Open Knowledge. Ed. Toru Liyoshi and M. S. Vijay Kumar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. 389–400. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Trimmer, Joseph F., Wade Jennings, and Annette Patterson. eFictions. New York: Harcourt, 2001.

IntroductionThere are two types of Africa. The first is a place where people and cultures live. The second is the image of Africa that has been invented through colonial knowledge and power. The colonial image of Africa, as the Other of Europe, a land “enveloped in the dark mantle of night” was supported by western states as it justified their colonial practices (Hegel 91). Any evidence that challenged the myth of the Dark Continent was destroyed, removed or ignored. While the looting of African natural resources has been studied, the looting of African knowledges hasn’t received as much attention, partly based on the assumption that Africans did not produce knowledge that could be stolen. This article invalidates this myth by examining the legacy of Ethiopia’s indigenous Ge’ez literature, and its looting and abduction by powerful western agents. The article argues that this has resulted in epistemic violence, where students of the Ethiopian indigenous education system do not have access to their books, while European orientalists use them to interpret Ethiopian history and philosophy using a foreign lens. The analysis is based on interviews with teachers and students of ten Ge’ez schools in Ethiopia, and trips to the Ethiopian manuscript collections in The British Library, The Princeton Library, the Institute of Ethiopian Studies and The National Archives in Addis Ababa.The Context of Ethiopian Indigenous KnowledgesGe’ez is one of the ancient languages of Africa. According to Professor Ephraim Isaac, “about 10,000 years ago, one single nation or community of a single linguistic group existed in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the Horn of Africa” (The Habesha). The language of this group is known as Proto-Afroasiatic or Afrasian languages. It is the ancestor of the Semitic, Cushitic, Nilotic, Omotic and other languages that are currently spoken in Ethiopia by its 80 ethnic groups, and the neighbouring countries (Diakonoff). Ethiopians developed the Ge’ez language as their lingua franca with its own writing system some 2000 years ago. Currently, Ge’ez is the language of academic scholarship, studied through the traditional education system (Isaac, The Ethiopian). Since the fourth century, an estimated 1 million Ge’ez manuscripts have been written, covering religious, historical, mathematical, medicinal, and philosophical texts.One of the most famous Ge’ez manuscripts is the Kebra Nagast, a foundational text that embodied the indigenous conception of nationhood in Ethiopia. The philosophical, political and religious themes in this book, which craft Ethiopia as God’s country and the home of the Ark of the Covenant, contributed to the country’s success in defending itself from European colonialism. The production of books like the Kebra Nagast went hand in hand with a robust indigenous education system that trained poets, scribes, judges, artists, administrators and priests. Achieving the highest stages of learning requires about 30 years after which the scholar would be given the rare title Arat-Ayina, which means “four eyed”, a person with the ability to see the past as well as the future. Today, there are around 50,000 Ge’ez schools across the country, most of which are in rural villages and churches.Ge’ez manuscripts are important textbooks and reference materials for students. They are carefully prepared from vellum “to make them last forever” (interview, 3 Oct. 2019). Some of the religious books are regarded as “holy persons who breathe wisdom that gives light and food to the human soul”. Other manuscripts, often prepared as scrolls are used for medicinal purposes. Each manuscript is uniquely prepared reflecting inherited wisdom on contemporary lives using the method called Tirguamme, the act of giving meaning to sacred texts. Preparation of books is costly. Smaller manuscript require the skins of 50-70 goats/sheep and large manuscript needed 100-120 goats/sheep (Tefera).The Loss of Ethiopian ManuscriptsSince the 18th century, a large quantity of these manuscripts have been stolen, looted, or smuggled out of the country by travellers who came to the country as explorers, diplomats and scientists. The total number of Ethiopian manuscripts taken is still unknown. Amsalu Tefera counted 6928 Ethiopian manuscripts currently held in foreign libraries and museums. This figure does not include privately held or unofficial collections (41).Looting and smuggling were sponsored by western governments, institutions, and notable individuals. For example, in 1868, The British Museum Acting Director Richard Holms joined the British army which was sent to ‘rescue’ British hostages at Maqdala, the capital of Emperor Tewodros. Holms’ mission was to bring treasures for the Museum. Before the battle, Tewodros had established the Medhanialem library with more than 1000 manuscripts as part of Ethiopia’s “industrial revolution”. When Tewodros lost the war and committed suicide, British soldiers looted the capital, including the treasury and the library. They needed 200 mules and 15 elephants to transport the loot and “set fire to all buildings so that no trace was left of the edifices which once housed the manuscripts” (Rita Pankhurst 224). Richard Holmes collected 356 manuscripts for the Museum. A wealthy British woman called Lady Meux acquired some of the most illuminated manuscripts. In her will, she bequeathed them to be returned to Ethiopia. However, her will was reversed by court due to a campaign from the British press (Richard Pankhurst). In 2018, the V&A Museum in London displayed some of the treasures by incorporating Maqdala into the imperial narrative of Britain (Woldeyes, Reflections).Britain is by no means the only country to seek Ethiopian manuscripts for their collections. Smuggling occurred in the name of science, an act of collecting manuscripts for study. Looting involved local collaborators and powerful foreign sponsors from places like France, Germany and the Vatican. Like Maqdala, this was often sponsored by governments or powerful financers. For example, the French government sponsored the Dakar-Djibouti Mission led by Marcel Griaule, which “brought back about 350 manuscripts and scrolls from Gondar” (Wion 2). It was often claimed that these manuscripts were purchased, rather than looted. Johannes Flemming of Germany was said to have purchased 70 manuscripts and ten scrolls for the Royal Library of Berlin in 1905. However, there was no local market for buying manuscripts. Ge’ez manuscripts were, and still are, written to serve spiritual and secular life in Ethiopia, not for buying and selling. There are countless other examples, but space limits how many can be provided in this article. What is important to note is that museums and libraries have accrued impressive collections without emphasising how those collections were first obtained. The loss of the intellectual heritage of Ethiopians to western collectors has had an enormous impact on the country.Knowledge Grabbing: The Denial of Access to KnowledgeWith so many manuscripts lost, European collectors became the narrators of Ethiopian knowledge and history. Edward Ullendorff, a known orientalist in Ethiopian studies, refers to James Bruce as “the explorer of Abyssinia” (114). Ullendorff commented on the significance of Bruce’s travel to Ethiopia asperhaps the most important aspect of Bruce’s travels was the collection of Ethiopic manuscripts… . They opened up entirely new vistas for the study of Ethiopian languages and placed this branch of Oriental scholarship on a much more secure basis. It is not known how many MSS. reached Europe through his endeavours, but the present writer is aware of at least twenty-seven, all of which are exquisite examples of Ethiopian manuscript art. (133)This quote encompasses three major ways in which epistemic violence occurs: denial of access to knowledge, Eurocentric interpretation of Ethiopian manuscripts, and the handling of Ge’ez manuscripts as artefacts from the past. These will be discussed below.Western ‘travellers’, such as Bruce, did not fully disclose how many manuscripts they took or how they acquired them. The abundance of Ethiopian manuscripts in western institutions can be compared to the scarcity of such materials among traditional schools in Ethiopia. In this research, I have visited ten indigenous schools in Wollo (Lalibela, Neakutoleab, Asheten, Wadla), in Gondar (Bahita, Kuskwam, Menbere Mengist), and Gojam (Bahirdar, Selam Argiew Maryam, Giorgis). In all of the schools, there is lack of Ge’ez manuscripts. Students often come from rural villages and do not receive any government support. The scarcity of Ge’ez manuscripts, and the lack of funding which might allow for the purchasing of books, means the students depend mainly on memorising Ge’ez texts told to them from the mouth of their teacher. Although this method of learning is not new, it currently is the only way for passing indigenous knowledges across generations.The absence of manuscripts is most strongly felt in the advanced schools. For instance, in the school of Qene, poetic literature is created through an in-depth study of the vocabulary and grammar of Ge’ez. A Qene student is required to develop a deep knowledge of Ge’ez in order to understand ancient and medieval Ge’ez texts which are used to produce poetry with multiple meanings. Without Ge’ez manuscripts, students cannot draw their creative works from the broad intellectual tradition of their ancestors. When asked how students gain access to textbooks, one student commented:we don’t have access to Birana books (Ge’ez manuscripts written on vellum). We cannot learn the ancient wisdom of painting, writing, and computing developed by our ancestors. We simply buy paper books such as Dawit (Psalms), Sewasew (grammar) or Degwa (book of songs with notations) and depend on our teachers to teach us the rest. We also lend these books to each other as many students cannot afford to buy them. Without textbooks, we expect to spend double the amount of time it would take if we had textbooks. (Interview, 3 Sep. 2019)Many students interrupt their studies and work as labourers to save up and buy paper textbooks, but they still don’t have access to the finest works taken to Europe. Most Ge’ez manuscripts remaining in Ethiopia are locked away in monasteries, church stores or other places to prevent further looting. The manuscripts in Addis Ababa University and the National Archives are available for researchers but not to the students of the indigenous system, creating a condition of internal knowledge grabbing.While the absence of Ge’ez manuscripts denied, and continues to deny, Ethiopians the chance to enrich their indigenous education, it benefited western orientalists to garner intellectual authority on the field of Ethiopian studies. In 1981, British Museum Director John Wilson said, “our Abyssinian holdings are more important than our Indian collection” (Bell 231). In reaction, Richard Pankhurst, the Director of Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa, responded that the collection was acquired through plunder. Defending the retaining of Maqdala manuscripts in Europe, Ullendorff wrote:neither Dr. Pankhurst nor the Ethiopian and western scholars who have worked on this collection (and indeed on others in Europe) could have contributed so significantly to the elucidation of Ethiopian history without the rich resources available in this country. Had they remained insitu, none of this would have been possible. (Qtd. in Bell 234)The manuscripts are therefore valued based on their contribution to western scholarship only. This is a continuation of epistemic violence whereby local knowledges are used as raw materials to produce Eurocentric knowledge, which in turn is used to teach Africans as though they had no prior knowledge. Scholars are defined as those western educated persons who can speak European languages and can travel to modern institutions to access the manuscripts. Knowledge grabbing regards previous owners as inexistent or irrelevant for the use of the grabbed knowledges.Knowledge grabbing also means indigenous scholars are deprived of critical resources to produce new knowledge based on their intellectual heritage. A Qene teacher commented: our students could not devote their time and energy to produce new knowledges in the same way our ancestors did. We have the tradition of Madeladel, Kimera, Kuteta, Mielad, Qene and tirguamme where students develop their own system of remembering, reinterpreting, practicing, and rewriting previous manuscripts and current ones. Without access to older manuscripts, we increasingly depend on preserving what is being taught orally by elders. (Interview, 4 Sep. 2019)This point is important as it relates to the common myth that indigenous knowledges are artefacts belonging to the past, not the present. There are millions of people who still use these knowledges, but the conditions necessary for their reproduction and improvement is denied through knowledge grabbing. The view of Ge’ez manuscripts as artefacts dismisses the Ethiopian view that Birana manuscripts are living persons. As a scholar told me in Gondar, “they are creations of Egziabher (God), like all of us. Keeping them in institutions is like keeping living bodies in graveyards” (interview, 5 Oct. 2019).Recently, the collection of Ethiopian manuscripts by western institutions has also been conducted digitally. Thousands of manuscripts have been microfilmed or digitised. For example, the EU funded Ethio-SPaRe project resulted in the digital collection of 2000 Ethiopian manuscripts (Nosnitsin). While digitisation promises better access for people who may not be able to visit institutions to see physical copies, online manuscripts are not accessible to indigenous school students in Ethiopia. They simply do not have computer or internet access and the manuscripts are catalogued in European languages. Both physical and digital knowledge grabbing results in the robbing of Ethiopian intellectual heritage, and denies the possibility of such manuscripts being used to inform local scholarship. Epistemic Violence: The European as ExpertWhen considered in relation to stolen or appropriated manuscripts, epistemic violence is the way in which local knowledge is interpreted using a foreign epistemology and gained dominance over indigenous worldviews. European scholars have monopolised the field of Ethiopian Studies by producing books, encyclopaedias and digital archives based on Ethiopian manuscripts, almost exclusively in European languages. The contributions of their work for western scholarship is undeniable. However, Kebede argues that one of the detrimental effects of this orientalist literature is the thesis of Semiticisation, the designation of the origin of Ethiopian civilisation to the arrival of Middle Eastern colonisers rather than indigenous sources.The thesis is invented to make the history of Ethiopia consistent with the Hegelian western view that Africa is a Dark Continent devoid of a civilisation of its own. “In light of the dominant belief that black peoples are incapable of great achievements, the existence of an early and highly advanced civilization constitutes a serious anomaly in the Eurocentric construction of the world” (Kebede 4). To address this anomaly, orientalists like Ludolph attributed the origin of Ethiopia’s writing system, agriculture, literature, and civilisation to the arrival of South Arabian settlers. For example, in his translation of the Kebra Nagast, Budge wrote: “the SEMITES found them [indigenous Ethiopians] negro savages, and taught them civilization and culture and the whole scriptures on which their whole literature is based” (x).In line with the above thesis, Dillman wrote that “the Abyssinians borrowed their Numerical Signs from the Greeks” (33). The views of these orientalist scholars have been challenged. For instance, leading scholar of Semitic languages Professor Ephraim Isaac considers the thesis of the Arabian origin of Ethiopian civilization “a Hegelian Eurocentric philosophical perspective of history” (2). Isaac shows that there is historical, archaeological, and linguistic evidence that suggest Ethiopia to be more advanced than South Arabia from pre-historic times. Various Ethiopian sources including the Kebra Nagast, the works of historian Asres Yenesew, and Ethiopian linguist Girma Demeke provide evidence for the indigenous origin of Ethiopian civilisation and languages.The epistemic violence of the Semeticisation thesis lies in how this Eurocentric ideological construction is the dominant narrative in the field of Ethiopian history and the education system. Unlike the indigenous view, the orientalist view is backed by strong institutional power both in Ethiopia and abroad. The orientalists control the field of Ethiopian studies and have access to Ge’ez manuscripts. Their publications are the only references for Ethiopian students. Due to Native Colonialism, a system of power run by native elites through the use of colonial ideas and practices (Woldeyes), the education system is the imitation of western curricula, including English as a medium of instruction from high school onwards. Students study the west more than Ethiopia. Indigenous sources are generally excluded as unscientific. Only the Eurocentric interpretation of Ethiopian manuscripts is regarded as scientific and objective.ConclusionEthiopia is the only African country never to be colonised. In its history it produced a large quantity of manuscripts in the Ge’ez language through an indigenous education system that involves the study of these manuscripts. Since the 19th century, there has been an ongoing loss of these manuscripts. European travellers who came to Ethiopia as discoverers, missionaries and scholars took a large number of manuscripts. The Battle of Maqdala involved the looting of the intellectual products of Ethiopia that were collected at the capital. With the introduction of western education and use of English as a medium of instruction, the state disregarded indigenous schools whose students have little access to the manuscripts. This article brings the issue of knowledge grapping, a situation whereby European institutions and scholars accumulate Ethiopia manuscripts without providing the students in Ethiopia to have access to those collections.Items such as manuscripts that are held in western institutions are not dead artefacts of the past to be preserved for prosperity. They are living sources of knowledge that should be put to use in their intended contexts. Local Ethiopian scholars cannot study ancient and medieval Ethiopia without travelling and gaining access to western institutions. This lack of access and resources has made European Ethiopianists almost the sole producers of knowledge about Ethiopian history and culture. For example, indigenous sources and critical research that challenge the Semeticisation thesis are rarely available to Ethiopian students. Here we see epistemic violence in action. Western control over knowledge production has the detrimental effect of inventing new identities, subjectivities and histories that translate into material effects in the lives of African people. In this way, Ethiopians and people all over Africa internalise western understandings of themselves and their history as primitive and in need of development or outside intervention. African’s intellectual and cultural heritage, these living bodies locked away in graveyards, must be put back into the hands of Africans.AcknowledgementThe author acknowledges the support of the Australian Academy of the Humanities' 2019 Humanities Travelling Fellowship Award in conducting this research.ReferencesBell, Stephen. “Cultural Treasures Looted from Maqdala: A Summary of Correspondence in British National Newspapers since 1981.” Kasa and Kasa. Eds. Tadesse Beyene, Richard Pankhurst, and Shifereraw Bekele. Addis Ababa: Ababa University Book Centre, 1990. 231-246.Budge, Wallis. A History of Ethiopia, Nubia and Abyssinia. London: Methuen and Co, 1982.Demeke, Girma Awgichew. The Origin of Amharic. Trenton: Red Sea Press, 2013.Diakonoff, Igor M. Afrasian Languages. Moscow: Nauka, 1988.Dillmann, August. Ethiopic Grammar. Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2005.Hegel, Georg W.F. The Philosophy of History. New York: Dover, 1956.Isaac, Ephraim. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church. New Jersey: Red Sea Press, 2013.———. “An Open Letter to an Inquisitive Ethiopian Sister.” The Habesha, 2013. 1 Feb. 2020 <http://www.zehabesha.com/an-open-letter-to-an-inquisitive-young-ethiopian-sister-ethiopian-history-is-not-three-thousand-years/>.Kebra Nagast. "The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menyelik I." Trans. Wallis Budge. London: Oxford UP, 1932.Pankhurst, Richard. "The Napier Expedition and the Loot Form Maqdala." Presence Africaine 133-4 (1985): 233-40.Pankhurst, Rita. "The Maqdala Library of Tewodros." Kasa and Kasa. Eds. Tadesse Beyene, Richard Pankhurst, and Shifereraw Bekele. Addis Ababa: Ababa University Book Centre, 1990. 223-230.Tefera, Amsalu. ነቅዐ መጻህፍት ከ መቶ በላይ በግዕዝ የተጻፉ የእኢትዮጵያ መጻህፍት ዝርዝር ከማብራሪያ ጋር።. Addis Ababa: Jajaw, 2019.Nosnitsin, Denis. "Ethio-Spare Cultural Heritage of Christian Ethiopia: Salvation, Preservation and Research." 2010. 5 Jan. 2019 <https://www.aai.uni-hamburg.de/en/ethiostudies/research/ethiospare/missions/pdf/report2010-1.pdf>. Ullendorff, Edward. "James Bruce of Kinnaird." The Scottish Historical Review 32.114, part 2 (1953): 128-43.Wion, Anaïs. "Collecting Manuscripts and Scrolls in Ethiopia: The Missions of Johannes Flemming (1905) and Enno Littmann (1906)." 2012. 5 Jan. 2019 <https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00524382/document>. Woldeyes, Yirga Gelaw. Native Colonialism: Education and the Economy of Violence against Traditions in Ethiopia. Trenton: Red Sea Press, 2017.———. “Reflections on Ethiopia’s Stolen Treasures on Display in a London Museum.” The Conversation. 2018. 5 June 2018 <https://theconversation.com/reflections-on-ethiopias-stolen-treasures-on-display-in-a-london-museum-97346>.Yenesew, Asres. ትቤ፡አክሱም፡መኑ፡ አንተ? Addis Ababa: Nigid Printing House, 1959 [1951 EC].

Introduction As social-distancing mandates in response to COVID-19 restricted in-person data collection methods such as participant observation and interviews, researchers turned to socially distant methods such as interviewing via video-conferencing technology (Lobe et al.). These were not new tools nor methods, but the pandemic muted any bias towards face-to-face data collection methods. Exemplified in crowd-sourced documents such as Doing Fieldwork in a Pandemic, researchers were encouraged to pivot to digital methods as a means of fulfilling research objectives, “specifically, ideas for avoiding in-person interactions by using mediated forms that will achieve similar ends” (Lupton). The benefits of digital methods for expanding participant cohorts and scope of research have been touted long before 2020 and COVID-19, and, as noted by Murthy, are “compelling” (“Emergent” 172). Research conducted by digital methods can expect to reap benefits such as “global datasets/respondents” and “new modalities for involving respondents” (Murthy, “Emergent” 172). The pivot to digital methods is not in and of itself an issue. What concerns us is that in the dialogues about shifting to digital methods during COVID-19, there does not yet appear to have been a critical consideration of how participant samples and collected data will be impacted upon or skewed towards recording the experiences of advantaged cohorts. Existing literature focusses on the time-saving benefits for the researcher, reduction of travel costs (Fujii), the minimal costs for users of specific platforms – e.g. Skype –, and presumes ubiquity of device access for participants (Cater). We found no discussion on data costs of accessing such services being potential barriers to participation in research, although Deakin and Wakefield did share our concern that: Online interviews may ... mean that some participants are excluded due to the need to have technological competence required to participate, obtain software and to maintain Internet connection for the duration of the discussion. In this sense, access to certain groups may be a problem and may lead to issues of representativeness. (605) We write this as a provocation to our colleagues conducting research at this time to consider the cultural and material capital of their participants and how that capital enables them to participate in digitally-mediated data gathering practices, or not, and to what extent. Despite highlighting the potential benefits of digital methods within a methodological tool kit, Murthy previously cautioned against the implications posed by digital exclusion, noting that “the drawback of these research options is that membership of these communities is inherently restricted to the digital ‘haves’ ... rather than the ‘have nots’” (“Digital” 845). In this article, we argue that while tools such as Zoom have indeed enabled fieldwork to continue despite COVID disruptions, this shift to online platforms has important and under-acknowledged implications for who is and is not able to participate in research. In making this argument, we draw on examples from the Connected Students project, a study of digital inclusion that commenced just as COVID-19 restrictions came into effect in the Australian state of Victoria at the start of 2020. We draw on the experiences of these households to illustrate the barriers that such cohorts face when participating in online research. We begin by providing details about the Connected Students project and then contextualising it through a discussion of research on digital inclusion. We then outline three areas in which households would have experienced (or still do experience) difficulties participating in online research: data, devices, and skills. We use these findings to highlight the barriers that disadvantaged groups may face when engaging in data collection activities over Zoom and question how this is impacting on who is and is not being included in research during COVID-19. The Connected Students Program The Connected Students program was conducted in Shepparton, a regional city located 180km north of Melbourne. The town itself has a population of around 30,000, while the Greater Shepparton region comprises around 64,000 residents. Shepparton was chosen as the program’s site because it is characterised by a unique combination of low-income and low levels of digital inclusion. First, Shepparton ranks in the lowest interval for the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA) and the Index of Relative Socioeconomic Advantage and Disadvantage (IRSAD), as reported in 2016 (Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Census”; Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Index”). Although Shepparton has a strong agricultural and horticultural industry with a number of food-based manufacturing companies in the area, including fruit canneries, dairies, and food processing plants, the town has high levels of long-term and intergenerational unemployment and jobless families. Second, Shepparton is in a regional area that ranks in the lowest interval for the Australian Digital Inclusion Index (Thomas et al.), which measures digital inclusion across dimensions of access, ability, and affordability. Funded by Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications provider, and delivered in partnership with Greater Shepparton Secondary College (GSSC), the Connected Students program provided low-income households with a laptop and an unlimited broadband Internet connection for up to two years. Households were recruited to the project via GSSC. To be eligible, households needed to hold a health care card and have at least one child attending the school in year 10, 11, or 12. Both the student and a caregiver were required to participate in the project to be eligible. Additional household members were invited to take part in the research, but were not required to. (See Kennedy & Holcombe-James; and Kennedy et al., "Connected Students", for further details regarding household demographics.) The Australian Digital Inclusion Index identifies that affordability is a significant barrier to digital inclusion in Australia (Thomas et al.). The project’s objective was to measure how removing affordability barriers to accessing connectivity for households impacts on digital inclusion. By providing participating households with a free unlimited broadband internet connection for the duration of the research, the project removed the costs associated with digital access. Access alone is not enough to resolve the digital exclusion confronted by these low-income households. Digital exclusion in these instances is not derived simply from the cost of Internet access, but from the cost of digital devices. As a result, these households typically lacked sufficient digital devices. Each household was therefore provided both a high speed Internet connection, and a brand new laptop with built-in camera, microphone, and speakers (a standard tool kit for video conferencing). Data collection for the Connected Students project was intended to be conducted face-to-face. We had planned in-person observations including semi-structured interviews with household members conducted at three intervals throughout the project’s duration (beginning, middle, and end), and technology tours of each home to spatially and socially map device locations and uses (Kennedy et al., Digital Domesticity). As we readied to make our first research trip to commence the study, COVID-19 was wreaking havoc. It quickly became apparent we would not be travelling to work, much less travelling around the state. We thus pivoted to digital methods, with all our data collection shifting online to interviews conducted via digital platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. While the pivot to digital methods saved travel hours, allowing us to scale up the number of households we planned to interview, it also demonstrated unexpected aspects of our participants’ lived experiences of digital exclusion. In this article, we draw on our first round of interviews which were conducted with 35 households over Zoom or Microsoft Teams during lockdown. The practice of conducting these interviews reveals insights into the barriers that households faced to digital research participation. In describing these experiences, we use pseudonyms for individual participants and refer to households using the pseudonym for the student participant from that household. Why Does Digital Inclusion Matter? Digital inclusion is broadly defined as universal access to the technologies necessary to participate in social and civic life (Helsper; Livingstone and Helsper). Although recent years have seen an increase in the number of connected households and devices (Thomas et al., “2020”), digital inclusion remains uneven. As elsewhere, digital disadvantage in the Australian context falls along geographic and socioeconomic lines (Alam and Imran; Atkinson et al.; Blanchard et al.; Rennie et al.). Digitally excluded population groups typically experience some combination of education, employment, income, social, and mental health hardship; their predicament is compounded by a myriad of important services moving online, from utility payments, to social services, to job seeking platforms (Australian Council of Social Service; Chen; Commonwealth Ombudsman). In addition to challenges in using essential services, digitally excluded Australians also miss out on the social and cultural benefits of Internet use (Ragnedda and Ruiu). Digital inclusion – and the affordability of digital access – should thus be a key concern for researchers looking to apply online methods. Households in the lowest income quintile spend 6.2% of their disposable income on telecommunications services, almost three times more than wealthier households (Ogle). Those in the lowest income quintile pay a “poverty premium” for their data, almost five times more per unit of data than those in the highest income quintile (Ogle and Musolino). As evidenced by the Australian Digital Inclusion Index, this is driven in part by a higher reliance on mobile-only access (Thomas et al., “2020”). Low-income households are more likely to access critical education, business, and government services through mobile data rather than fixed broadband data (Thomas et al., “2020”). For low-income households, digital participation is the top expense after housing, food, and transport, and is higher than domestic energy costs (Ogle). In the pursuit of responsible and ethical research, we caution against assuming research participants are able to bear the brunt of access costs in terms of having a suitable device, expending their own data resources, and having adequate skills to be able to complete the activity without undue stress. We draw examples from the Connected Students project to support this argument below. Findings: Barriers to Research Participation for Digitally Excluded Households If the Connected Students program had not provided participating households with a technology kit, their preexisting conditions of digital exclusion would have limited their research participation in three key ways. First, households with limited Internet access (particularly those reliant on mobile-only connectivity, and who have a few gigabytes of data per month) would have struggled to provide the data needed for video conferencing. Second, households would have struggled to participate due to a lack of adequate devices. Third, and critically, although the Connected Students technology kit provided households with the data and devices required to participate in the digital ethnography, this did not necessarily resolve the skills gaps that our households confronted. Data Prior to receiving the Connected Students technology kit, many households in our sample had limited modes of connectivity and access to data. For households with comparatively less or lower quality access to data, digital participation – whether for the research discussed here, or in contemporary life – came with very real costs. This was especially the case for households that did not have a home Internet connection and instead relied solely on mobile data. For these households, who carefully managed their data to avoid running out, participating in research through extended video conferences would have been impossible unless adequate financial reimbursement was offered. Households with very limited Internet access used a range of practices to manage and extend their data access by shifting internet costs away from the household budget. This often involved making use of free public Wi-Fi or library internet services. Ellie’s household, for instance, spent their weekends at the public library so that she and her sister could complete their homework. While laborious, these strategies worked well for the families in everyday life. However, they would have been highly unsuitable for participating in research, particularly during the pandemic. On the most obvious level, the expectations of library use – if not silent, then certainly quiet – would have prohibited a successful interview. Further, during COVID-19 lockdowns, public libraries (and other places that provide public Internet) became inaccessible for significant periods of time. Lastly, for some research designs, the location of participants is important even when participation is occurring online. In the case of our own project, the house itself as the site of the interview was critical as our research sought to understand how the layout and materiality of the home impacts on experiences of digital inclusion. We asked participants to guide us around their home, showing where technologies and social activities are colocated. In using the data provided by the Connected Students technology kit, households with limited Internet were able to conduct interviews within their households. For these families, participating in online research would have been near impossible without the Connected Students Internet. Devices Even with adequate Internet connections, many households would have struggled to participate due to a lack of suitable devices. Laptops, which generally provide the best video conferencing experience, were seen as prohibitively expensive for many families. As a result, many families did not have a laptop or were making do with a laptop that was excessively slow, unreliable, and/or had very limited functions. Desktop computers were rare and generally outdated to the extent that they were not able to support video conferencing. One parent, Melissa, described their barely-functioning desktop as “like part of the furniture more than a computer”. Had the Connected Students program not provided a new laptop with video and audio capabilities, participation in video interviews would have been difficult. This is highlighted by the challenges students in these households faced in completing online schooling prior to receiving the Connected Students kit. A participating student, Mallory, for example, explained she had previously not had a laptop, reliant only on her phone and an old iPad: Interviewer: Were you able to do all your homework on those, or was it sometimes tricky?Mallory: Sometimes it was tricky, especially if they wanted to do a call or something ... . Then it got a bit hard because then I would use up all my data, and then didn’t have much left.Interviewer: Yeah. Right.Julia (Parent): ... But as far as schoolwork, it’s hard to do everything on an iPad. A laptop or a computer is obviously easier to manoeuvre around for different things. This example raises several common issues that would likely present barriers to research participation. First, Mallory’s household did not have a laptop before being provided with one through the Connected Students program. Second, while her household did prioritise purchasing tablets and smartphones, which could be used for video conferencing, these were more difficult to navigate for certain tasks and used up mobile data which, as noted above, was often a limited resource. Lastly, it is worth noting that in households which did already own a functioning laptop, it was often shared between several household members. As one parent, Vanessa, noted, “yeah, until we got the [Connected Students] devices, we had one laptop between the four of us that are here. And Noel had the majority use of that because that was his school work took priority”. This lack of individuated access to a device would make participation in some research designs difficult, particularly those that rely on regular access to a suitable device. Skills Despite the Connected Students program’s provision of data and device access, this did not ensure successful research participation. Many households struggled to engage with video research interviews due to insufficient digital skills. While a household with Internet connectivity might be considered on the “right” side of the digital divide, connectivity alone does not ensure participation. People also need to have the knowledge and skills required to use online resources. Brianna’s household, for example, had downloaded Microsoft Teams to their desktop computer in readiness for the interview, but had neglected to consider whether that device had video or audio capabilities. To work around this restriction, the household decided to complete the interview via the Connected Students laptop, but this too proved difficult. Neither Brianna nor her parents were confident in transferring the link to the interview between devices, whether by email or otherwise, requiring the researchers to talk them through the steps required to log on, find, and send the link via email. While Brianna’s household faced digital skills challenges that affected both parent and student participants, in others such as Ariel’s, these challenges were focussed at the parental level. In these instances, the student participant provided a vital resource, helping adults navigate platforms and participate in the research. As Celeste, Ariel’s parent, explained, it's just new things that I get a bit – like, even on here, because your email had come through to me and I said to Ariel "We're going to use your computer with Teams. How do we do this?" So, yeah, worked it out. I just had to look up my email address, but I [initially thought] oh, my god; what am I supposed to do here? Although helpful in our own research given its focus on school-aged young people, this dynamic of parents being helped by their dependents illustrates that the adults in our sample were often unfamiliar with the digital skills required for video conferencing. Research focussing only on adults, or on households in which students have not developed these skills through extended periods of online education such as occurred during the COVID-19 lockdowns, may find participants lacking the digital skills to participate in video interviews. Participation was also impacted upon by participants' lack of more subtle digital skills around the norms and conventions of video conferencing. Several households, for example, conducted their interviews in less ideal situations, such as from both moving and parked cars. A portion of the household interview with Piper’s household was completed as they drove the 30 minutes from their home into Shepperton. Due to living out of town, this household often experienced poor reception. The interview was thus regularly disrupted as they dropped in and out of range, with the interview transcript peppered with interjections such as “we’re going through a bit of an Internet light spot ... we’re back ... sorry ...” (Karina, parent). Finally, Piper switched the device on which they were taking the interview to gain a better connection: “my iPad that we were meeting on has worse Internet than my phone Internet, so we kind of changed it around” (Karina). Choosing to participate in the research from locations other than the home provides evidence of the limited time available to these families, and the onerousness of research participation. These choices also indicate unfamiliarity with video conferencing norms. As digitally excluded households, these participants were likely not the target of popular discussions throughout the pandemic about optimising video conferences through careful consideration of lighting, background, make-up and positioning (e.g. Lasky; Niven-Phillips). This was often identified by how participants positioned themselves in front of the camera, often choosing not to sit squarely within the camera lens. Sometimes this was because several household members were participating and struggled to all sit within view of the single device, but awkward camera positioning also occurred with only one or two people present. A number of interviews were initially conducted with shoulders, or foreheads, or ceilings rather than “whole” participants until we asked them to reposition the device so that the camera was pointing towards their faces. In noting this unfamiliarity we do not seek to criticise or apportion responsibility for accruing such skills to participating households, but rather to highlight the impact this had on the type of conversation between researcher and participant. Such practices offer valuable insight into how digital exclusion impacts on individual’s everyday lives as well as on their research participation. Conclusion Throughout the pandemic, digital methods such as video conferencing have been invaluable for researchers. However, while these methods have enabled fieldwork to continue despite COVID-19 disruptions, the shift to online platforms has important and under-acknowledged implications for who is and is not able to participate in research. In this article, we have drawn on our research with low-income households to demonstrate the barriers that such cohorts experience when participating in online research. Without the technology kits provided as part of our research design, these households would have struggled to participate due to a lack of adequate data and devices. Further, even with the kits provided, households faced additional barriers due to a lack of digital literacy. These experiences raise a number of questions that we encourage researchers to consider when designing methods that avoid in person interactions, and when reviewing studies that use similar approaches: who doesn’t have the technological access needed to participate in digital and online research? What are the implications of this for who and what is most visible in research conducted during the pandemic? Beyond questions of access, to what extent will disadvantaged populations not volunteer to participate in online research because of discomfort or unfamiliarity with digital tools and norms? When low-income participants are included, how can researchers ensure that participation does not unduly burden them by using up precious data resources? And, how can researchers facilitate positive and meaningful participation among those who might be less comfortable interacting through mediums like video conferencing? In raising these questions we acknowledge that not all research will or should be focussed on engaging with disadvantaged cohorts. Rather, our point is that through asking questions such as this, we will be better able to reflect on how data and participant samples are being impacted upon by shifts to digital methods during COVID-19 and beyond. As researchers, we may not always be able to adapt Zoom-based methods to be fully inclusive, but we can acknowledge this as a limitation and keep it in mind when reporting our findings, and later when engaging with the research that was largely conducted online during the pandemic. Lastly, while the Connected Students project focusses on impacts of affordability on digital inclusion, digital disadvantage intersects with many other forms of disadvantage. Thus, while our study focussed specifically on financial disadvantage, our call to be aware of who is and is not able to participate in Zoom-based research applies to digital exclusion more broadly, whatever its cause. Acknowledgements The Connected Students project was funded by Telstra. This research was also supported under the Australian Research Council's Discovery Early Career Researchers Award funding scheme (project number DE200100540). References Alam, Khorshed, and Sophia Imran. “The Digital Divide and Social Inclusion among Refugee Migrants: A Case in Regional Australia.” Information Technology & People 28.2 (2015): 344–65. Atkinson, John, Rosemary Black, and Allan Curtis. “Exploring the Digital Divide in an Australian Regional City: A Case Study of Albury”. Australian Geographer 39.4 (2008): 479–493. 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While the term “visual literacy” has grown in popularity in the last 50 years, its meaning remains nebulous. It is described variously as: a vehicle for aesthetic appreciation, a means of defence against visual manipulation, a sorting mechanism for an increasingly data-saturated age, and a prerequisite to civic inclusion (Fransecky 23; Messaris 181; McTigue and Flowers 580). Scholars have written extensively about the first three subjects but there has been less research on how visual literacy frames civic life and how it might help the public as a tool to address disadvantage and assist in removing social and cultural barriers. This article examines a forerunner to visual literacy in the push to create an international symbol language born out of popular education movements, a project that fell short of its goals but still left a considerable impression on graphic media. This article, then, presents an analysis of visual literacy campaigns in the early postwar era. These campaigns did not attempt to invent a symbolic language but posited that images themselves served as a universal language in which students could receive training. Of particular interest is how the concept of visual literacy has been mobilised as a pedagogical tool in design, digital humanities and in broader civic education initiatives promoted by Third Space institutions. Behind the creation of new visual literacy curricula is the idea that images can help anchor a world community, supplementing textual communication. Figure 1: Visual Literacy Yearbook. Montebello Unified School District, USA, 1973. Shedding Light: Origins of the Visual Literacy Frame The term “visual literacy” came to the fore in the early 1970s on the heels of mass literacy campaigns. The educators, creatives and media theorists who first advocated for visual learning linked this aim to literacy, an unassailable goal, to promote a more radical curricular overhaul. They challenged a system that had hitherto only acknowledged a very limited pathway towards academic success; pushing “language and mathematics”, courses “referred to as solids (something substantial) as contrasted with liquids or gases (courses with little or no substance)” (Eisner 92). This was deemed “a parochial view of both human ability and the possibilities of education” that did not acknowledge multiple forms of intelligence (Gardner). This change not only integrated elements of mass culture that had been rejected in education, notably film and graphic arts, but also encouraged the critique of images as a form of good citizenship, assuming that visually literate arbiters could call out media misrepresentations and manipulative political advertising (Messaris, “Visual Test”). This movement was, in many ways, reactive to new forms of mass media that began to replace newspapers as key forms of civic participation. Unlike simple literacy (being able to decipher letters as a mnemonic system), visual literacy involves imputing meanings to images where meanings are less fixed, yet still with embedded cultural signifiers. Visual literacy promised to extend enlightenment metaphors of sight (as in the German Aufklärung) and illumination (as in the French Lumières) to help citizens understand an increasingly complex marketplace of images. The move towards visual literacy was not so much a shift towards images (and away from books and oration) but an affirmation of the need to critically investigate the visual sphere. It introduced doubt to previously upheld hierarchies of perception. Sight, to Kant the “noblest of the senses” (158), was no longer the sense “least affected” by the surrounding world but an input centre that was equally manipulable. In Kant’s view of societal development, the “cosmopolitan” held the key to pacifying bellicose states and ensuring global prosperity and tranquillity. The process of developing a cosmopolitan ideology rests, according to Kant, on the gradual elimination of war and “the education of young people in intellectual and moral culture” (188-89). Transforming disparate societies into “a universal cosmopolitan existence” that would “at last be realised as the matrix within which all the original capacities of the human race may develop” and would take well-funded educational institutions and, potentially, a new framework for imparting knowledge (Kant 51). To some, the world of the visual presented a baseline for shared experience. Figure 2: Exhibition by the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Vienna, photograph c. 1927. An International Picture Language The quest to find a mutually intelligible language that could “bridge worlds” and solder together all of humankind goes back to the late nineteenth century and the Esperanto movement of Ludwig Zamenhof (Schor 59). The expression of this ideal in the world of the visual picked up steam in the interwar years with designers and editors like Fritz Kahn, Gerd Arntz, and Otto and Marie Neurath. Their work transposing complex ideas into graphic form has been rediscovered as an antecedent to modern infographics, but the symbols they deployed were not to merely explain, but also help education and build international fellowship unbounded by spoken language. The Neuraths in particular are celebrated for their international picture language or Isotypes. These pictograms (sometimes viewed as proto-emojis) can be used to represent data without text. Taken together they are an “intemporal, hieroglyphic language” that Neutrath hoped would unite working-class people the world over (Lee 159). The Neuraths’ work was done in the explicit service of visual education with a popular socialist agenda and incubated in the social sphere of Red Vienna at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (Social and Economic Museum) where Otto served as Director. The Wirtschaftsmuseum was an experiment in popular education, with multiple branches and late opening hours to accommodate the “the working man [who] has time to see a museum only at night” (Neurath 72-73). The Isotype contained universalist aspirations for the “making of a world language, or a helping picture language—[that] will give support to international developments generally” and “educate by the eye” (Neurath 13). Figure 3: Gerd Arntz Isotype Images. (Source: University of Reading.) The Isotype was widely adopted in the postwar era in pre-packaged sets of symbols used in graphic design and wayfinding systems for buildings and transportation networks, but with the socialism of the Neuraths’ peeled away, leaving only the system of logos that we are familiar with from airport washrooms, charts, and public transport maps. Much of the uptake in this symbol language could be traced to increased mobility and tourism, particularly in countries that did not make use of a Roman alphabet. The 1964 Olympics in Tokyo helped pave the way when organisers, fearful of jumbling too many scripts together, opted instead for black and white icons to represent the program of sports that summer. The new focus on the visual was both technologically mediated—cheaper printing and broadcast technologies made the diffusion of image increasingly possible—but also ideologically supported by a growing emphasis on projects that transcended linguistic, ethnic, and national borders. The Olympic symbols gradually morphed into Letraset icons, and, later, symbols in the Unicode Standard, which are the basis for today’s emojis. Wordless signs helped facilitate interconnectedness, but only in the most literal sense; their application was limited primarily to sports mega-events, highway maps, and “brand building”, and they never fulfilled their role as an educational language “to give the different nations a common outlook” (Neurath 18). Universally understood icons, particularly in the form of emojis, point to a rise in visual communication but they have fallen short as a cosmopolitan project, supporting neither the globalisation of Kantian ethics nor the transnational socialism of the Neuraths. Figure 4: Symbols in use. Women's bathroom. 1964 Tokyo Olympics. (Source: The official report of the Organizing Committee.) Counter Education By mid-century, the optimism of a universal symbol language seemed dated, and focus shifted from distillation to discernment. New educational programs presented ways to study images, increasingly reproducible with new technologies, as a language in and of themselves. These methods had their roots in the fin-de-siècle educational reforms of John Dewey, Helen Parkhurst, and Maria Montessori. As early as the 1920s, progressive educators were using highly visual magazines, like National Geographic, as the basis for lesson planning, with the hopes that they would “expose students to edifying and culturally enriching reading” and “develop a more catholic taste or sensibility, representing an important cosmopolitan value” (Hawkins 45). The rise in imagery from previously inaccessible regions helped pupils to see themselves in relation to the larger world (although this connection always came with the presumed superiority of the reader). “Pictorial education in public schools” taught readers—through images—to accept a broader world but, too often, they saw photographs as a “straightforward transcription of the real world” (Hawkins 57). The images of cultures and events presented in Life and National Geographic for the purposes of education and enrichment were now the subject of greater analysis in the classroom, not just as “windows into new worlds” but as cultural products in and of themselves. The emerging visual curriculum aimed to do more than just teach with previously excluded modes (photography, film and comics); it would investigate how images presented and mediated the world. This gained wider appeal with new analytical writing on film, like Raymond Spottiswoode's Grammar of the Film (1950) which sought to formulate the grammatical rules of visual communication (Messaris 181), influenced by semiotics and structural linguistics; the emphasis on grammar can also be seen in far earlier writings on design systems such as Owen Jones’s 1856 The Grammar of Ornament, which also advocated for new, universalising methods in design education (Sloboda 228). The inventorying impulse is on display in books like Donis A. Dondis’s A Primer of Visual Literacy (1973), a text that meditates on visual perception but also functions as an introduction to line and form in the applied arts, picking up where the Bauhaus left off. Dondis enumerates the “syntactical guidelines” of the applied arts with illustrations that are in keeping with 1920s books by Kandinsky and Klee and analyse pictorial elements. However, at the end of the book she shifts focus with two chapters that examine “messaging” and visual literacy explicitly. Dondis predicts that “an intellectual, trained ability to make and understand visual messages is becoming a vital necessity to involvement with communication. It is quite likely that visual literacy will be one of the fundamental measures of education in the last third of our century” (33) and she presses for more programs that incorporate the exploration and analysis of images in tertiary education. Figure 5: Ideal spatial environment for the Blueprint charts, 1970. (Image: Inventory Press.) Visual literacy in education arrived in earnest with a wave of publications in the mid-1970s. They offered ways for students to understand media processes and for teachers to use visual culture as an entry point into complex social and scientific subject matter, tapping into the “visual consciousness of the ‘television generation’” (Fransecky 5). Visual culture was often seen as inherently democratising, a break from stuffiness, the “artificialities of civilisation”, and the “archaic structures” that set sensorial perception apart from scholarship (Dworkin 131-132). Many radical university projects and community education initiatives of the 1960s made use of new media in novel ways: from Maurice Stein and Larry Miller’s fold-out posters accompanying Blueprint for Counter Education (1970) to Emory Douglas’s graphics for The Black Panther newspaper. Blueprint’s text- and image-dense wall charts were made via assemblage and they were imagined less as charts and more as a “matrix of resources” that could be used—and added to—by youth to undertake their own counter education (Cronin 53). These experiments in visual learning helped to break down old hierarchies in education, but their aim was influenced more by countercultural notions of disruption than the universal ideals of cosmopolitanism. From Image as Text to City as Text For a brief period in the 1970s, thinkers like Marshall McLuhan (McLuhan et al., Massage) and artists like Bruno Munari (Tanchis and Munari) collaborated fruitfully with graphic designers to create books that mixed text and image in novel ways. Using new compositional methods, they broke apart traditional printing lock-ups to superimpose photographs, twist text, and bend narrative frames. The most famous work from this era is, undoubtedly, The Medium Is the Massage (1967), McLuhan’s team-up with graphic designer Quentin Fiore, but it was followed by dozens of other books intended to communicate theory and scientific ideas with popularising graphics. Following in the footsteps of McLuhan, many of these texts sought not just to explain an issue but to self-consciously reference their own method of information delivery. These works set the precedent for visual aids (and, to a lesser extent, audio) that launched a diverse, non-hierarchical discourse that was nonetheless bound to tactile artefacts. In 1977, McLuhan helped develop a media textbook for secondary school students called City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media. It is notable for its direct address style and its focus on investigating spaces outside of the classroom (provocatively, a section on the third page begins with “Should all schools be closed?”). The book follows with a fine-grained analysis of advertising forms in which students are asked to first bring advertisements into class for analysis and later to go out into the city to explore “a man-made environment, a huge warehouse of information, a vast resource to be mined free of charge” (McLuhan et al., City 149). As a document City as Classroom is critical of existing teaching methods, in line with the radical “in the streets” pedagogy of its day. McLuhan’s theories proved particularly salient for the counter education movement, in part because they tapped into a healthy scepticism of advertisers and other image-makers. They also dovetailed with growing discontent with the ad-strew visual environment of cities in the 1970s. Budgets for advertising had mushroomed in the1960s and outdoor advertising “cluttered” cities with billboards and neon, generating “fierce intensities and new hybrid energies” that threatened to throw off the visual equilibrium (McLuhan 74). Visual literacy curricula brought in experiential learning focussed on the legibility of the cities, mapping, and the visualisation of urban issues with social justice implications. The Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (DGEI), a “collective endeavour of community research and education” that arose in the aftermath of the 1967 uprisings, is the most storied of the groups that suffused the collection of spatial data with community engagement and organising (Warren et al. 61). The following decades would see a tamed approach to visual literacy that, while still pressing for critical reading, did not upend traditional methods of educational delivery. Figure 6: Beginning a College Program-Assisting Teachers to Develop Visual Literacy Approaches in Public School Classrooms. 1977. ERIC. Searching for Civic Education The visual literacy initiatives formed in the early 1970s both affirmed existing civil society institutions while also asserting the need to better inform the public. Most of the campaigns were sponsored by universities, major libraries, and international groups such as UNESCO, which published its “Declaration on Media Education” in 1982. They noted that “participation” was “essential to the working of a pluralistic and representative democracy” and the “public—users, citizens, individuals, groups ... were too systematically overlooked”. Here, the public is conceived as both “targets of the information and communication process” and users who “should have the last word”. To that end their “continuing education” should be ensured (Study 18). Programs consisted primarily of cognitive “see-scan-analyse” techniques (Little et al.) for younger students but some also sought to bring visual analysis to adult learners via continuing education (often through museums eager to engage more diverse audiences) and more radical popular education programs sponsored by community groups. By the mid-80s, scores of modules had been built around the comprehension of visual media and had become standard educational fare across North America, Australasia, and to a lesser extent, Europe. There was an increasing awareness of the role of data and image presentation in decision-making, as evidenced by the surprising commercial success of Edward Tufte’s 1982 book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Visual literacy—or at least image analysis—was now enmeshed in teaching practice and needed little active advocacy. Scholarly interest in the subject went into a brief period of hibernation in the 1980s and early 1990s, only to be reborn with the arrival of new media distribution technologies (CD-ROMs and then the internet) in classrooms and the widespread availability of digital imaging technology starting in the late 1990s; companies like Adobe distributed free and reduced-fee licences to schools and launched extensive teacher training programs. Visual literacy was reanimated but primarily within a circumscribed academic field of education and data visualisation. Figure 7: Visual Literacy; What Research Says to the Teacher, 1975. National Education Association. USA. Part of the shifting frame of visual literacy has to do with institutional imperatives, particularly in places where austerity measures forced strange alliances between disciplines. What had been a project in alternative education morphed into an uncontested part of the curriculum and a dependable budget line. This shift was already forecasted in 1972 by Harun Farocki who, writing in Filmkritik, noted that funding for new film schools would be difficult to obtain but money might be found for “training in media education … a discipline that could persuade ministers of education, that would at the same time turn the budget restrictions into an advantage, and that would match the functions of art schools” (98). Nearly 50 years later educators are still using media education (rebranded as visual or media literacy) to make the case for fine arts and humanities education. While earlier iterations of visual literacy education were often too reliant on the idea of cracking the “code” of images, they did promote ways of learning that were a deep departure from the rote methods of previous generations. Next-gen curricula frame visual literacy as largely supplemental—a resource, but not a program. By the end of the 20th century, visual literacy had changed from a scholarly interest to a standard resource in the “teacher’s toolkit”, entering into school programs and influencing museum education, corporate training, and the development of public-oriented media (Literacy). An appreciation of image culture was seen as key to creating empathetic global citizens, but its scope was increasingly limited. With rising austerity in the education sector (a shift that preceded the 2008 recession by decades in some countries), art educators, museum enrichment staff, and design researchers need to make a case for why their disciplines were relevant in pedagogical models that are increasingly aimed at “skills-based” and “job ready” teaching. Arts educators worked hard to insert their fields into learning goals for secondary students as visual literacy, with the hope that “literacy” would carry the weight of an educational imperative and not a supplementary field of study. Conclusion For nearly a century, educational initiatives have sought to inculcate a cosmopolitan perspective with a variety of teaching materials and pedagogical reference points. Symbolic languages, like the Isotype, looked to unite disparate people with shared visual forms; while educational initiatives aimed to train the eyes of students to make them more discerning citizens. The term ‘visual literacy’ emerged in the 1960s and has since been deployed in programs with a wide variety of goals. Countercultural initiatives saw it as a prerequisite for popular education from the ground up, but, in the years since, it has been formalised and brought into more staid curricula, often as a sort of shorthand for learning from media and pictures. The grand cosmopolitan vision of a complete ‘visual language’ has been scaled back considerably, but still exists in trace amounts. Processes of globalisation require images to universalise experiences, commodities, and more for people without shared languages. Emoji alphabets and globalese (brands and consumer messaging that are “visual-linguistic” amalgams “increasingly detached from any specific ethnolinguistic group or locality”) are a testament to a mediatised banal cosmopolitanism (Jaworski 231). In this sense, becoming “fluent” in global design vernacular means familiarity with firms and products, an understanding that is aesthetic, not critical. It is very much the beneficiaries of globalisation—both state and commercial actors—who have been able to harness increasingly image-based technologies for their benefit. To take a humorous but nonetheless consequential example, Spanish culinary boosters were able to successfully lobby for a paella emoji (Miller) rather than having a food symbol from a less wealthy country such as a Senegalese jollof or a Morrocan tagine. This trend has gone even further as new forms of visual communication are increasingly streamlined and managed by for-profit media platforms. The ubiquity of these forms of communication and their global reach has made visual literacy more important than ever but it has also fundamentally shifted the endeavour from a graphic sorting practice to a critical piece of social infrastructure that has tremendous political ramifications. Visual literacy campaigns hold out the promise of educating students in an image-based system with the potential to transcend linguistic and cultural boundaries. This cosmopolitan political project has not yet been realised, as the visual literacy frame has drifted into specialised silos of art, design, and digital humanities education. It can help bridge the “incomplete connections” of an increasingly globalised world (Calhoun 112), but it does not have a program in and of itself. Rather, an evolving visual literacy curriculum might be seen as a litmus test for how we imagine the role of images in the world. 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