Search

This article considers the distinct challenges that works of art pose for those managing non-art specialist research libraries across the United Kingdom. Using analysis of survey and case-study interview data, the article demonstrates that current approaches to the management of art in non-art specialist research libraries are uneven in such key areas as collection management; cataloguing; storage and access; and librarianship and training. This article seeks to build consensus on best practices with respect to the management of art in libraries and proposes practical recommendations for libraries seeking to improve the care and use of the art in their collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: E-cigarettes are a popular smoking-cessation tool. Although less harmful than tobacco, use of e-cigarettes by non-smokers should be prevented. There is concern about the use of e-cigarettes by young people and that e-cigarettes may renormalise smoking. In May 2016, Tobacco Products Directive regulations aimed to reduce e-cigarettes’ appeal to young people. Aims: To examine the effects of the Tobacco Products Directive regulations on young people’s use of e-cigarettes, and the role of e-cigarettes in renormalising smoking. Design: A mixed-method natural experimental evaluation combining secondary analyses of survey data, with process evaluation, including interviews with young people, policy stakeholders, retailers and trading standards observers, and observations of retail settings. Settings: Wales, Scotland and England. Participants: Survey participants were aged 13–15 years, living in England, Scotland or Wales and participated in routinely conducted surveys from 1998 to 2019. Process evaluation participants included 14- to 15-year-olds in England, Scotland and Wales, policy stakeholders, trading standards offices and retailers. Intervention: Regulation of e-cigarettes, including bans on cross-border advertising, health warnings and restrictions on product strength. Comparison group: Interrupted time series design, with baseline trends as the comparator. Main outcome measures: The primary outcome was ever e-cigarette use. Secondary outcomes included regular use, ever and regular smoking, smoking attitudes, alcohol and cannabis use. Data capture and analysis: Our primary statistical analysis used data from Wales, including 91,687 young people from the 2013–19 Health Behaviour in School-aged Children and School Health Research Network surveys. In Scotland, we used the Scottish Schools Adolescent Lifestyle and Substance Use Survey and in England we used the Smoking Drinking and Drug Use surveys. The process evaluation included interviews with 73 young people in 2017 and 148 young people in 2018, 12 policy stakeholders, 13 trading standards officers and 27 retailers. We observed 30 retail premises before and after implementation. Data were integrated using the Medical Research Council’s process evaluation framework. Results: Ever smoking continued to decline alongside the emergence of e-cigarettes, with a slight slowing in decline for regular use. Tobacco Products Directive regulations were described by stakeholders as well implemented, and observations indicated good compliance. Young people described e-cigarettes as a fad and indicated limited interaction with the components of the Tobacco Products Directive regulations. In primary statistical analyses in Wales [i.e. short (to 2017) and long term (to 2019)], growth in ever use of e-cigarettes prior to Tobacco Products Directive regulations did not continue after implementation. Change in trend was significant in long-term analysis, although of similar magnitude at both time points (odds ratio 0.96). Data from England and Scotland exhibited a similar pattern. Smoking followed the opposite pattern, declining prior to the Tobacco Products Directive regulations, but plateauing as growth in e-cigarette use stalled. Limitations: Alternative causal explanations for changes cannot be ruled out because of the observational design. Conclusions: Young people’s ever and regular use of e-cigarettes appears to have peaked around the time of the Tobacco Products Directive regulations and may be declining. Although caution is needed in causal attributions, findings are consistent with an effect of regulations. Our analysis provides little evidence that e-cigarettes renormalise smoking. More recent data indicate that declines in smoking are plateauing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature relating to education sessions in special collections has been prevalent in the field since the early 2000s. Following on from the publication of the ACRL-RBMS-SAA Guidelines for Primary Source Literacy published in the USA in 2018, this paper applies the guidelines to survey and interview responses to explore the key skills gained by undergraduates using special collections and the barriers to skills' acquisition throughout their degree programmes. Contextualizing the results through US and UK literature, this paper argues that special collections literacy can be embedded into interdisciplinary undergraduate curricula which in turn may help special collections advocate for increased resources to broaden their education programmes. It establishes a picture of current special collections education for UK universities including range, methods of delivery and assessment styles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets out a methodology for integrating a focus on the student voice in deliberations about the future of teaching and learning in the Arts and Humanities. Qualitative data gleaned from JISC's 20/21 Student Digital Experience Insights Survey and feedback collected from students studying on undergraduate programmes in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom (UK) is used to sketch out pedagogical imaginaries of the future that can be used heuristically by universities as they work their way through the pandemic and out the other side. The imaginaries, it argues, act as tools to kickstart debates, underpin experimentation and inform pedagogical planning and design. To address questions of credibility and plausibility, the imaginaries are rooted in the present, embody empirical trends and are consistent with practices, structures and technologies that have come to prominence during the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intensive Care Units (ICUs) became key end-of-life spaces during the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK. Many nurses were redeployed to ICU from other specialities, navigating changing roles, priorities, and risks. Limited resources including time, equipment, and staffing widened nurses' responsibilities; the virus' infectious nature restricted family visits, even at end of life. Emerging literature explores ICU deaths during Covid-19, but little focuses on nurses' experiences, especially those redeployed. Here, we explore how redeployed nurses negotiated these competing demands on their emotional and physical resources, and undertook meaning-making, by integrating a framework of 'sensemaking' with theories of coping. Drawing on interviews with six nurses from two UK-based longitudinal qualitative studies we detail profound shifts that uniquely challenged nurses' sense of identity, duty, and purpose. This included adopting untested caring protocols, de-prioritising 'non-essential' care, and establishing communication rituals with patients/families. Understanding how nurses negotiated and performed their roles when paradigms of care were dramatically destabilised is vital to supporting workforce recovery from burnout, moral injury, and moral distress. This research also provides important learning for the management of future emergency responses and extends knowledge of how lived experience maps onto theoretical knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the passage of time, celluloid film degrades and valuable film history is lost, resulting in loss of cultural history which contributes to the shared sense of community, identify, and place at a local and national level. Despite the growth in digitised services for accessing cultural resources, to date no economic valuation has been performed on digital local history resources which are accessible online. Despite the recent emergence of online portals for digital cultural services in many countries (such as virtual tours of art galleries and digitisation of cultural archives) a shift which has accelerated in response to the Covid-19 epidemic, there remains a major literature gap around the value of digital culture. Failure to account for the value of digital archives risks sub-optimal allocation of resources to accessing and preserving these aspects of local cultural history. In response, we performed the first contingent valuation study to estimate willingness to pay for a free online film archive portal containing historical film footage for localities throughout the United Kingdom. Users were willing to pay an average hypothetical subscription for digital archive film services of £38.52/annum. Non-users in the general population were asked their willingness to pay a hypothetical annual donation to maintain free public access (£4.68/annum on average). The results suggest that positive social value is gained from online access to digital archive film, and from knowing that the cultural heritage continues to be digitally accessible by the public for current and future generations. We outline how this evidence aligns with a theoretical framework of use and non-use value for digital goods and services extending beyond those who currently use the portal, to those introduced to it, and those in the general public who have never directly experienced the online archive service. We also report what we believe is the first application of Subjective Wellbeing analysis to engagement with a digital cultural service. The advantage of applying methods from economics to value cultural activities in monetary terms is that it makes emerging modes of digital cultural goods and services commensurable with other costs and benefits as applied to cultural policy and investment decisions, putting it on a level footing with physical cultural assets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The caring mother is one of the most recurring images of femininity in post-war advertising. We examine how mothers are depicted as knowing consumers in advertisements in Australian Women's Weekly and the United Kingdom's Good Housekeeping magazines between 1950 and 2010. Our data suggest that although visual representations of maternal consumer knowledge change over this period, assumptions about the responsibilities of mothers endure in the family-related advertisements in these women's magazines. There is a shift over time, however, from a representation of mothers as passive recipients of advice provided by external experts to a more active representation of mothers as experts themselves within both domestic and private spheres. We trace historically how the trope of the knowing mother works as a visual discursive device that helps to reinforce not just patriarchal hegemony, but a particular form of maternal hegemony. The hegemony of motherhood presents a particularly desirable/idealised femininity. However, this visual depiction also serves to gender the very way in which maternal knowledge is to be used. While maternal knowledge is depicted as changing from being merely intuitive or practical to subsuming the technique of knowledge or prescribed expertise; the purposes for which such knowledge is used remain firmly situated within the maternal/feminine realm of nurturing and caring consumption for the family. Despite shifts in discourse that appear to increasingly value mothers' knowledge—there exists an enduring assumption that mothers should use their knowledge for domestic caring and consumption, ultimately reinforcing a heteronormativity of the use of women's knowledge that subdues even expert knowledge for a domestic purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the mitigating strategies used in North American petitions to King George III in order to minimize the face threatening potential inherent in the colonists' requests for redress of their grievances. Drawing together models from speech-act, politeness and relational theories, the study aims at establishing the complex facework dynamics deriving from a clash of reality paradigms between the inhabitants of the colonies and the British government. Results reveal an ambiguous attitude on the part of petitioners who, while striving for reconciliation, venture into face attacks which ultimately reveal their contrasting views on the issue of the American dependence on Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of the special acts of worship that were widely observe by the Anglo-Jewry community in Great Britain in 1700-1970. The acts were for the same purpose as the acts ordered by the Church of England. Other topics include the attitudes of the British Jewry leaders to the wider British community and its institutions and the Jewish communities worldwide, and the histories of British religion and international Jewry.