Do conservators dream of electric sheep? Replicas and replication

The paper crosses the boundaries between different genres, drawing on key material and emphasising the philosophical challenges around decision-making and values in relation to replication and replicas. In 1968, Philip K. Dick wrote the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which became the inspiration for the 1982 film Bladerunner. The book is set in Los Angeles in a post-apocalyptic future where mankind has left Earth, resulting in androids being created to develop new ‘off-world’ colonies. The book and film create a novel and interesting framework to discuss the subject of replicas and replication within contemporary conservation practice. Key themes are decay promoting replication, original versus replica, creating empathy in replication. The debate focuses on the case study of Naum Gabo's Construction in Space (Crystal) of 1937–39; which was the sculpture replicated in the most recent replication project at Tate, completed in July 2015.     

基于VSM的专家领域分析及可视化研究

根据专家所发表的学术论文对其研究领域进行分析和挖掘。首先抽取专家的有代表性的学术论文,构建这些论文的空间向量特征;然后与已构建的不同研究领域的空间向量做相似性分析,并通过对所有文章的综合,计算出专家在不同研究领域的权重;最后利用交互式可视化工具直观地分析专家的领域专长以及相互关系,并且根据专家之间学术研究的相似性对专家进行聚类分析。     

The Emerging Library: Structure,Culture, and Lessons Learned from the Dissolution of a Combined Libraries–IT Organization

ABSTRACT

In 1997 the University of Southern California merged campus technology operations and the libraries into the USC Information Services Division (ISD). When the university dissolved ISD in 2006, the USC Libraries became a stand-alone entity for the first time in a decade. This article describes the USC Libraries’ approach to rebuilding an identity as an active partner in teaching, learning, and research at USC. It outlines the planning process used to develop a new organizational structure, highlights practical and cultural challenges that followed the dissolution, and describes several significant lessons learned.     

Digitally Empowered

In January 2013, Peter Bradshaw, a film critic for The Guardian, said that Twitter users had become the favourite “critics” of the film industry. The implicit concern in this article on a subject dear to cultural journalism—“Would be criticism bankrupted when we are all ‘critics’ on the Web?”—became evident in the following years. It is pertinent, then, to explore the media answer not only to this subject but both to sourcing and expertise in general in the culture section. Did they embrace these new news sources (and which) that emerged in the digital environment, such as the reader, blogs or artists tweets? Assuming the first hypothesis, how did they include them in their editorial model, alongside with the “traditional” experts and sources? We conducted a content analysis to the culture section of an international media—The Guardian—between 2014 and 2016 (n?=?992), identifying the role of what we would like to call digitally empowered sources and the presence of new “experts” in cultural criticism. We concluded that these digitally empowered sources play an important role in the overall editorial, business and engagement media's strategy and are deeply engaged with a new digital feature: hypertextuality. New patterns of expertise also reflect an editorial positioning supported in an engagement strategy and in the recognition of the readers’ added value to content.     

Conceptual Model for the Replacement of the Horn of a Nineteenth Century Phonograph

ABSTRACT

3D printing of missing parts of a cultural heritage artifact opens many possibilities and extends the challenges in the processes of intervention on cultural heritage assets. However, restoring these objects may not only mean the replacement of a missing element from its esthetic point of view, but restoring the function for which objects were created. In these processes, the replica of the object must be exact and of quality, but also specific. In this sense, the presented work is a multi-disciplinary attempt to reproduce the missing horn of a phonograph dated to the late nineteenth century. This phonograph belongs to the collection of the ‘Vicente Miralles Segarra’ Telecommunication Museum of the Universitat Politècnica de València. The objective was to recover its esthetic, didactic, and functional levels, i.e restoring its ability to emit sound. To this end, several models were printed with different materials, and the quality of the recorded sound with the different horns was evaluated, assessing their similarity to that obtained from an original horn.     

Validating Wordscores: The Promises and Pitfalls of Computational Text Scaling

ABSTRACT

Wordscores is a popular computational text analysis method with numerous applications in communication research. Wordscores claims to scale documents on specified dimensions without requiring researchers to read or even understand the language of the input text. We investigate whether Wordscores delivers this claim by scaling the Euromanifestos of 117 political parties across 23 countries on 4 salient dimensions of political conflict. We assess validity by comparing the Wordscores estimates to expert surveys and other judgmental measures, and by examining the Wordscores’s estimates ability to predict party membership in the European Parliament groups. We find that the Wordscores estimates correlate poorly with expert and judgmental measures of party positions, while the latter outperform Wordscores in the predictive validity test. We conclude that Wordscores does not live up to its original claim of a “quick and easy” language blind method, and urge researchers to demonstrate the validity of the method in their domain of interest before any empirical analysis.     

Notes on reconstructing “the popular”

ABSTRACT

Drawing on Stuart Hall’s influential “Notes on deconstructing ‘the popular’” [Hall, S. (1981). In R. Samuel (Eds.), People’s history and socialist theory (pp. 227–240). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.], this essay maps out some of the major shifts in cultural studies’ relationship to popular culture over the past several decades. It concludes with a call for cultural studies to find ways to work from the terrain of the popular, rather than merely studying that terrain, or trying to “translate” its scholarly analyses for popular audiences. This is a necessary path to fulfilling its mission as a political project.     

Using Consultation Data to Guide Data Services Training for Liaison Librarians

Abstract

As data services gain momentum in academic libraries, liaison librarians are expected to be part of the education force for data literacy. Nonetheless, due to the broad scope of data literacy, training librarians to improve data-related skills can be challenging. This article used consultation statistics to identify tools and resources employed to solve users’ data questions. The results offered insights into users’ data needs and provided librarians with a clear direction to further develop data skills in their assigned disciplines. The methodology used in this study can be replicated at other institutions to identify needs and to direct professional development.     

The effects of newscaster gender and vocal quality on perceptions of Homophily and interpersonal attraction

The research attempted to clarify the “ideal newscaster” concept. Only newscaster gender contributed to a significant difference, and only on physical attraction. Findings are discussed with regard to their implications for viewers’ selective exposure to news broadcasts.     

Pre-Revolutionary Russian Photography at the New York Public Library: An Introduction

ABSTRACT

This article is an introduction to the New York Public Library’s pre-revolutionary Russian and Eastern European photographic albums. It also provides a checklist of these albums. The checklist is an especially rich source for Russian architecture, art, and science and provides documentation for a variety of places in the center and provinces of the Russian Empire. Some of the most significant albums are those once owned by the Romanovs and by George Kennan the elder, America’s first Russian expert.     

Preventive Conservation: People,Objects, Place and Time in the Philippines

ABSTRACT

Preventive conservation, with its origins grounded in the material fabric of cultural material, is in a period of transformation, with numerous practitioners, in and outside of the field of conservation, considering its broader and holistic objectives. The conventional tools for the assertion of preventive conservation principles, namely the assessment and management of risks to cultural material from the ‘ten agents of deterioration’, have a central focus on the primacy of physical materials and degradation, with less clear relationships with people, place, and time in their modelling. With a case study focus on collections in the Philippines, this paper argues for a practice of preventive conservation that incorporates a balanced assessment and broader thinking around the contexts of objects, people, place, and time. The case studies of ecclesiastical Church collections, and museum environments in the Philippines, demonstrate how the interdependency of objects, people, place and time forms a holistic and conceptual preventive conservation framework. Through a cyclic renegotiation of these four parameters, this paper speculates on the gaps and opportunities for an inclusive view of preventive conservation that is current and more sustainable.     

Solvent Vapour Use – The Unintended Consequences in Textile Conservation

ABSTRACT

The impact of solvent vapour from two solvents, acetone and industrial denatured alcohol (IDA), commonly used in adhesive reactivation in textile conservation, when applied to artificially soiled silk fabric through either Gore-Tex^® or Reemay^® membranes for exposure times of either 1 or 3 min, was measured using microscopy and ImageJ to monitor the movement of the solid particulates of the soiling, and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy with attenuated total reflectance (FTIR-ATR) to monitor the movement of the oily components. Analysis using these techniques successfully showed the movement of large particulates through the textile and a decrease in the presence of oil. Analysis with FTIR-ATR showed that the application of solvent vapour by a poultice method produces more than just a surface change and the vapour can penetrate far enough into the fibres to cause a change in the level of oil through the entire textile. The results showed that the solvents and barrier membranes have characteristic differences which impact on the changes on the soiling. The application of acetone produced a greater change in the movement of oil on the front and back of the samples than the application of IDA, while a comparison between the barrier membranes showed a greater change occurring in the level of oil with the use of Gore-Tex^® rather than Reemay^®. The time of exposure to solvent vapour made little difference to the changes to the textile soiling. Quantitatively significant results were gathered from analysis of the changes in the oil measured with FTIR-ATR, and qualitative changes in the large particulate soiling, demonstrating the potential usefulness of ImageJ open access software in future historic textile soiling monitoring studies.     

The decisions and processes involved in a systematic search strategy: a hierarchical framework

Objective:The decisions and processes that may compose a systematic search strategy have not been formally identified and categorized. This study aimed to (1) identify all decisions that could be made and processes that could be used in a systematic search strategy and (2) create a hierarchical framework of those decisions and processes.Methods:The literature was searched for documents or guides on conducting a literature search for a systematic review or other evidence synthesis. The decisions or processes for locating studies were extracted from eligible documents and categorized into a structured hierarchical framework. Feedback from experts was sought to revise the framework. The framework was revised iteratively and tested using recently published literature on systematic searching.Results:Guidance documents were identified from expert organizations and a search of the literature and Internet. Data were extracted from 74 eligible documents to form the initial framework. The framework was revised based on feedback from 9 search experts and further review and testing by the authors. The hierarchical framework consists of 119 decisions or processes sorted into 17 categories and arranged under 5 topics. These topics are “Skill of the searcher,” “Selecting information to identify,” “Searching the literature electronically,” “Other ways to identify studies,” and “Updating the systematic review.”Conclusions:The work identifies and classifies the decisions and processes used in systematic searching. Future work can now focus on assessing and prioritizing research on the best methods for successfully identifying all eligible studies for a systematic review.     

Textile conservation in Spain

Abstract

This paper offers a topical overview of textile restoration and conservation in Spain. It discusses the distribution of collections and conditions of research and training. The main textile workshops are described, together with their most important projects, past, present and future.     

从专家审稿意见到编辑部意见

对于学术期刊而言,专家审稿意见是编辑部意见的重要组成和权威参考,但两者并不等同,不能简单移植。编辑应充分发挥自身的主体能动性,以期刊立场和作者立场为立足点,细致地做好从专家意见到编辑部意见的转化,即对单个专家意见和编辑部意见做“加减法”的同时,整合调整多位专家的审稿意见并以编辑部统一的标准进行综合平衡。     

STORAGE OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL TEXTILE FINDS IN SEALED BOXES

Abstract

A white deposit was observed on the glass lids of boxes used to store archaeological textile fragments for some 40 years. It was identified as sodium formate formed from formaldehyde given off by cardboard in the boxes. Heavy metal ions in some samples of the deposit originated, via the textile fragments, from corroded bronze ornaments in the graves.     

Brick,Mortar, and Screen: Networked Digital Media,Popular Music,and the Reinvention of the Public Radio Station

ABSTRACT

This article details the various forces that shaped public radio station KEXP’s evolution from the 70s to today. It addresses the ways that Seattle’s specific cultural, economic, and technological advantages enabled it to take on its current form as a key presence in global pop music curation and discovery. It argues that the station’s progression thus represents a potential model for other legacy public radio stations in an era of diminishing public and institutional funding. However, this approach’s viability will depend upon how effectively stations are able to leverage their local communities to compete in the networked digital media paradigm.     

Surface spectroscopic studies on patinas of ancient metal objects

Abstract

Surface examination by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and Auger electron spectrosopy has beenemployed to investigate the patinas on Lorenzo Ghiberti’s ‘Door of Paradise’from the Florence Baptistry and one of the so-called Riace bronzes. These techniques and the related depth profiling technique are described; the results gave interesting information on thestate of conservation, the original manufacturing process and the possible original appearance.     

(2) The Role of the National Diet Library in Sharing National Library Resources

Abstract

This article outlines several significant features of reading in Russia today. First the change of the cultural hierarchy is addressed: no longer is the reading of the classics a status symbol, indicating the reader’s adherence to traditional norms of culture. The classics have been abandoned as readers unashamedly pursue light entertainment in the form of detective stories, romances, etc. Second, there has emerged a new system of cultural organization as a result of the collapse of central state direction. So far these new forms of organization have proven totally inadequate: much of publishing is beyond the reach of both bibliographic control mechanisms and libraries, which are gradually ceasing to function as sites where high culture is consumed.