Networked Learning: Perspectives and Issues looks at what networked learning has to offer and how best we can ensure that its take-up maintains or improves the quality of learning in higher education. It looks at the key issues which will be of interest to anyone using, or thinking of using, this important technology including practitioners, policy-makers and managers in higher education, learning technologists, and support and library staff. It will also be invaluable to anyone researching or studying in relevant areas.

Networked Learning: Perspectives and Issues

Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World.

The electronic library/Internet intensifies the need for information skills in academic research, in three categories: judgement; knowledge and operation of resources; linguistic/logical skills. There is a corresponding quantum leap in the information skills training requirement. Strategies for training within the doctoral supervision process are outlined. Qualitative data, from the Information Access project, on current practice among supervisors suggest that to train researchers successfully: (i) recognition of the size of the problem is required; (ii) a different model of library skills training needs to be adopted; (iii) the developmental nature of training needs to be recognised; (iv) research supervisors have an important role to play along-side librarians; (v) explicit discussion of metacognitive aspects of these skills is necessary; (vi) national and local institutions need to formulate training policy; (vii) supervisors themselves need training and support; (viii) academics and students need to t...

Information skills for an electronic world: training doctoral research students

Purpose – Little is known about the information‐seeking behavior of practicing visual artists; what research exists has focused largely on art students, art faculty and librarians, although an untested model does emerge. The aim of this paper is to report the findings of an empirical study of a community of practicing visual artists, and to determine whether the model can be applied to such communities.Design/methodology/approach – A quantitative study was administered to a sample of a community of practicing visual artists in order to determine the community's use of various information sources in the service of creative and sales activities.Findings – The paper finds that the model may be applied to practicing visual artists. It provides a portrait of the information behavior of a specific community of practice, and suggests how information use may differ, while following the model, among different demographic groups within the community.Research limitations/implications – The research approach and find...

An empirical study of the information‐seeking behavior of practicing visual artists

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the literature on the information behavior of practicing visual artists to determine if a consistent model emerges and what further research is necessary.Design/methodology/approach – Works dealing with the information needs and uses relevant to the creative activities of visual artists are discussed in the paper. These works are assessed for their contributions toward understanding of the specific information behaviors of practicing artists.Findings – The results show that a consistent model of artists' information behavior emerges. However, nearly all of the literature focuses on art students, academic art faculty, or librarians, and so any claim that practicing artists fit the model is largely unsupported by research. There have been no published studies of communities of practicing visual artists. The implications of defining artists as communities of practice are discussed.Research limitations/implications – Research is proposed that studies the infor...

The information‐seeking behavior of visual artists: a literature review

A typical morning in a typical art college library is described. Ways in which art students use libraries, and the materials they require, are summarised. The fact that art students can get by without using libraries is noted in discussion of advantages and disadvantages of decentralised art libraries and of the centralisation of art library resources in libraries of wider scope. This paper was delivered to the course on ‘The Literature of Art and Architecture’, organised by ARLIS with the Library Association, in London on 6th December 1979.

How art students use libraries ~ if they do

Consider the following propositions. 'Design is an ancient activity even though a modern profession.'1 And, 'All that we do, almost all the time, is design, for design is basic to all human activity.'2 And yet in its relatively short life as an academic discipline, design history has very largely focused on design as a modern activity practised more or less exclusively by a professional elite. Clearly 'design' can be defined broadly and narrowly, and the purpose of this article is not to challenge the legitimacy of any given definition in its own terms; my intention is, rather, to seek to widen a focus which seems to have become unnecessarily and misleadingly myopic. Rebutting the well-known opening sentences of Victor Papanek's Design for the Real World from which the second of my opening statements is taken, John A. Walker argued that 'the truism that design is a process all human beings engage in to some extent ignores the specialized, professional character of design in modern society . ..'3 Not so: to acknowledge the former is by no means to deny the latter. Moreover, if such special pleading was ever needed, that time is now gone. The 'specialized, professional character of design' has become so well established, its status confirmed by the cult of 'designer' products, by the celebration of designers as stars, and by the emergence of a design history which tells its story, that it is design as an activity practised by all human beings which is in danger of being not merely ignored but progressively undermined and marginalized until it all but ceases to be.

‘Anyone Designing Anything?’ Non-Professional Designers and the History of Design

Cet article traite de la formation des utilisateurs et de son evolution avec l'evolution des bibliotheques et de leur fonctionnement. Il montre qu'actuellement la formation des utilisateurs consiste plutot a former les utilisateurs a des competences a acquerir pour l'acces et l'utilisation de l'information

Teaching user education, learning information skills; or, towards the self‐explanatory library

‘Universal Availability of Publications’ (UAP) and the universal availability of art publications should be considered in the context of ‘one world’, a world in which we all share responsibility for our fellow human beings. In this context both librarianship and art, and thus art librarianship also, should be seen as services rendered to humankind at large. IFLA’s UAP programme has been conceived as a service, intended to supply genuine human needs, and art librarians, who are constantly frustrated in their efforts to serve users of art libraries by the limitations to the availability of art documentation, can readily identify a need for ‘Universal Availability of Art Publications’. Nevertheless, a worldwide programme of this nature is in danger, first, of being pursued for its own sake (or for the sake of ‘needs’ which are imagined, over-emphasised, or misconceived), and second, of reinforcing cultural imperialism. Safeguards include acceptance of the necessity to proceed step by step in pursuit of a success which can never be complete; the fact that UAP is founded on local collections developed to meet local needs; recognition of the imbalance in the production of publications in different parts of the world; and recognition of the importance of unpublished documentation and of ‘publications’ which do not as yet exist. A greater emphasis on increasing the availability, and generating the production, of publications from countries which publish relatively little, is proposed. A fourth safeguard ought to derive from the professional ethics and grass-roots experience of librarians, who serve and identify with library users, actual and potential. The pursuit of universal availability of art publications should be based on realistic assessment of what is feasible, and on local, regional, and national resources, with all possible encouragement being given to developing countries to document their own arts. Art librarians may be paying too little attention to the needs of users and, especially, of non-users of art libraries, and should be aware of the barriers to availability which can result from the prevalence of a narrow, elitist conception of ‘Art’ and from the provision of library services primarily for an elite. Without neglecting the service of scholarship, the art library profession should try to shift the balance of its commitment towards the provision of a service for everyone, everywhere, so that our interpretation and pursuit of the ‘Universal Availability of Art Publications’ truly reflects a vision of our whole world’s heritage and practice ‘of divers arts’. This is the text of a paper presented to the Section of Art Libraries, at the 1985 IFLA Council in Chicago.

The universal availability of art publications: a global context

Ephemera, the fleeting images of moments in time, are valuable for the historical perspectives, social insights and visual stimuli they can generate. The means of collecting are various and frequently cheap. Collections can be organised along simple or sophisticated lines depending on individual libraries’ resources. These notes started life as a short paper, presented to audiences at Sydney, Melbourne, and Hobart during a tour of Australia which the author made at the invitation of ARLIS/ANZ in September 1979; in this revised and extended form they were read to an inaugural meeting of an ARLIS North West of England group, at Preston Polytechnic on October 31st 1979.

Philip Pacey

Papers

How art students use libraries ~ if they do

‘Anyone Designing Anything?’ Non-Professional Designers and the History of Design

Teaching user education, learning information skills; or, towards the self‐explanatory library

The universal availability of art publications: a global context

Ephemera and art libraries: archive or lucky dip?