Use of selection tools in New Zealand secondary school libraries

<p>The purpose of this research was to investigate the use of selection tools in New Zealand secondary schools, specifically which selection tools are used, how satisfactory the tools are, and which criteria secondary school librarians use in assessing selection tools. Particular attention was paid to the status of evaluative and alerting selection tools in school libraries. A mail questionnaire was sent to a random nationwide sample of 186 secondary school librarians. To gain a richer understanding of the context of selection in secondary schools, 4 focus groups were also held in the Wellington, Horowhenua, Palmerston North, and Wanganui areas. The resulting data was analysed alongside the questionnaire data to provide more comprehensive answers to the study's research questions. The study found that alerting tools were more widely used and considered more valuable than evaluative tools, with the ability to preview an item a key concern for school librarians. Tools supplied by the book selling and publishing industries were the most common tools used, and the features of selection tools considered most important focused on a tool's performance as an alerting tool. Online tools were not widely used, with connectivity problems and lack of time cited as the most common reasons.</p>

Use of selection tools in New Zealand secondary school libraries

<p>The purpose of this research was to investigate the use of selection tools in New Zealand secondary schools, specifically which selection tools are used, how satisfactory the tools are, and which criteria secondary school librarians use in assessing selection tools. Particular attention was paid to the status of evaluative and alerting selection tools in school libraries. A mail questionnaire was sent to a random nationwide sample of 186 secondary school librarians. To gain a richer understanding of the context of selection in secondary schools, 4 focus groups were also held in the Wellington, Horowhenua, Palmerston North, and Wanganui areas. The resulting data was analysed alongside the questionnaire data to provide more comprehensive answers to the study's research questions. The study found that alerting tools were more widely used and considered more valuable than evaluative tools, with the ability to preview an item a key concern for school librarians. Tools supplied by the book selling and publishing industries were the most common tools used, and the features of selection tools considered most important focused on a tool's performance as an alerting tool. Online tools were not widely used, with connectivity problems and lack of time cited as the most common reasons.</p>

Illuminated Caxtons and the Trade in Printed Books

This article suggests that the illuminated initials and borderwork added to ten early printed books in England are attributable to a single illuminator, the ‘Incunables Limner’, an individual for whom there is circumstantial evidence that he specialized in the illumination of printed books. Five of these books are copies of William Caxton’s Golden Legend (Westminster, 1483–84), while the other five are Continental imprints (two from Strasbourg, and one from each of Basel, Verona, and Parma) printed between 1476 and 1484. In addition, a second illuminator can be identified in a sixth copy of Caxton’s Golden Legend, working to the same design as that employed within the five copies decorated by the Incunables Limner. The possibility is considered that books illuminated by the Incunables Limner were products of Caxton’s overseas trade, and that it was through acting in this capacity that the artist’s specialization was viable. The Continental books are explored for what they might imply about Caxton’s wider book-selling strategies, and three with evidence for early English ownership are selected for particular attention.

Acquiring the proceedings of scholarly events to the collections of RAS Library for Natural Sciences

The research libraries thoroughly analyze new information resources emerging on the information market as well as the dynamics and vectors of information and communication processes in science. The author discusses the findings of the study of acquiring the proceedings of scholarly events to the collections of the Library for Natural Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences. This type of publications comprises information on the most recent developments, vectors in fundamental and applied research accomplished by national and foreign research organizations. With this information resource, researchers are able to find like-minded colleagues and to assess their own possibilities and prospects for their own studies. The reference materials, conference proceedings and other scholarly publications are of undoubtful interest to the scholarly community; however, the circulations are small, and, as a rule, the book-selling organizations do not distribute these publications. The circulation depends on the number of participants attending the scholarly event. Therefore the conference, symposium, seminar proceedings can be categorized as rare publications. The accumulated experience of collection development with these publications enables to analyze other types of small-circulation scientific publications acquired to the collections of the library.

Pengaruh Sikap pada Ebook dan Sikap pada Buku Fisik terhadap Minat Baca Masyarakat di Era Industri 4.0

One of the creative industry’ products which are inside of it are writings and pictures produced from one's creative thinking is book. For some communities, reading physical books are still an option if compared with reading digital book or called e-book. This is related with the age, neighborhood, social status and the level of education. Along with the development of the times, there has been a lot of growing up the publishing industry and also the profession of book writer, but it is not end by printing physical books, but in digital platform only. The process of e-book selling is increase every day and it become a capable industry to sustain the economic needs of communities. The quantitative research that compiled by collecting questionnaire data to the people of Jakarta and surrounding areas provides data presentation that Ebooks and physical books are important factors that influence people's interest in reading in the industrial era 4.0. Both types of books have their own appeal to attract individual mints according to different age groups.

The neighbourhood of Al-Mutanabbi Street, Baghdad: A personal narrative and recollections of a childhood in Baghdad in the 1940s

These notes are a continuation of the recollections of the author’s personal experiences growing up in 1940s Baghdad while actively engaged in the family business of book selling in the old Suq Al-Saray which was located in the centre of what is now identified as ‘old’ Baghdad City. Reflecting the experience of being born and raised within a block of the now world famous Al-Mutanaby Street, aspects of these recollections were recently published in the form of two articles published in the International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies (9:3, pp. 165–90) and Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World (13:2, pp. 217–25). The present contribution represents a continuation of these personal recollections together with some associated historical commentary that terminates in October 1951 on the author’s departure from Baghdad to study engineering in England.

Comics in Russia: Transmedia Narrative and Publishing Strategies

Mass culture creates genre-and-style phenomena that possess both the illusion of a simplified understanding and a complex aesthetic nature. Comics is a phenomenon reflecting trends in the development of mass culture at the turn of the 21st century. In comics, the plot and genre are secondary (graphic novel, various adaptations and retellings), the aesthetics is ambivalent (playful and serious; secular, amateurish and professional), the text has a complex artistic nature (creolisation, polycodedness, centaurism, transmedia features) and, at the same time, an essential goal for reaching commercial success and facilitated consumption/perception. The article aims to describe and analyse the genre-and-style features of the comic strip as a transmedia phenomenon of mass culture. These features give grounds for assessing the principles and tendencies of the presence of the comics in the domestic book market, in particular, the ways of forming the publishing repertoire. The general trend of the modern study of comics (in addition to analysing specific samples of the genre) is the reflection of visual aesthetics in the artistic structure of its text. It is the basis for the inclusion of this genre into mass literature. The peculiarity of the poetics of the comic book lies in the transmedia and sequenciality means that organise the dramatic narrative and visual plot as equal artistic spaces. In combination with the experience of visual media, the genre, style, and discourse of mass culture acquire attributes of transmedia, marginality, and transfer, i.e. tendencies to the mobility of the borders of the traditional genre-and-style system and going beyond them with the help of several different media (visualisation). They have an impact on the genre-and-style features of the comics, and the features of the multimedia information space built on repetition and convergence—sequels, remakes—are becoming more and more familiar. The intention to replicate recognisable stories readers demand encourages major publishers to rely on comic book remakes, comic book adaptations, comic book sequels. There is an extensive development “in depth and in breadth” of the already familiar successful plot, character, aesthetic discourse. Publishing houses are not interested in expanding the thematic repertoire of the comic book, but they seek to update and deepen the reading experience through the emergence of national genre patterns, the discovery of new authors’ names. This leads to a non-linear dynamics in both book publishing and book selling practices in the comics industry and in the genre. The change in the range of comic books is mainly due to various types of remakes, including plot (plot and style, when the aesthetics of the narrative changes) variants of a well-known story. Thus, publishers are faced with common problems in their marketing strategies: objective, related to the lack of understanding of the genre nature and existence of comics, and specifically publishing—the emergence of special technological operations in the production of comics as a publication.