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The article presents several notices of relevance to sociology scholars. The 2009 winners are announced of the prize of the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung für sozialwissenschaftliche Aufsätze (Fritz Thyssen Foundation for Social Scientific Articles). The 40th GESIS Spring Seminar in Cologne, Germany is announced for March 2011. A call for papers is issued for the 10th Conference of the European Sociological Association convening in September 2011 in Geneva, Switzerland.

This article reports on a symposium of the Consortium of Swiss Academic Libraries for long-term availability of royalty-bearing digital content (i.e. licensed content) and summarises the papers presented at the symposium and the discussion phases between the lectures. Starting from a statement on the reasons of the consortium to deal with issues of long-term availability of royalty-bearing content (looking for a technical and organisational solution to ensure post-cancellation-access to various electronic journals for the consortium member libraries) the state of digital preservation activities in some European countries is outlined (Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, France, Italy, Great Britain). The two long-term-preservation projects LOCKSS and Portico are described in terms of their concepts, their organisational structures and their modes of operation. Advantages and disadvantages of both projects are shown through their comparison. The implementation of a LOCKSS test-installation at the Library of ETH Zurich is briefly outlined and the perspective of a major academic publishing house (Springer) on the issue of digital preservation is reported. The event as a whole is being evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article consists of news briefs on political science topics, including a prize titled "Worst EU Lobbying Award" which is awarded by the organizations Corporate Europe Observatory, Friends of the Earth Europe, and Lobby-Control, a position paper which was released in December of 2008 by the organization Transparency International concerning transparency in lobbying, and a conference taking place June 23-26, 2009 at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, concerning social movements.

The article discusses a review of early modern era criminal court records from Zurich, Switzerland, that raise questions about the problems of comparing the meanings of the concepts of "rape" and "abuse" in that pre-modern period to modern times. The author notes that crimes of "sexualized violence" in the earlier era may involve different understandings of the terms applied to those crimes. She also wonders how a modern person can understand a concept of "fairness" in the former time period, given sentences that seem unjust to those living in a later time.

"The social costs of energy production and consumption in terms of increased mortality and morbidity are estimated for Switzerland using recent empirical studies on air pollution and health in the United States. These costs were between 100 and 300 million Swiss francs 1980 and occurred mainly as externalities. The paper illustrates how these externalities could be corrected via a Pigou tax. However, there is uncertainty about the epidemiological basis and the imputed values for health and mortality reductions making the imposition of such a tax infeasible until better cost estimates are available." (summary in ENG, FRE), (excerpt)