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Books in Social sciences

The Social Sciences collection forms a definitive resource for those entering, researching, or teaching in any of the many disciplines making up this interdisciplinary area of study. Written by experts and researchers from both Academic and Commercial domains, titles offer global scope and perspectives.

Key subject areas include: Library and Information Science; Transportation; Urban Studies; Geography, Planning, and Development; Security; Emergency Management.

  • The Human Side of Reference and Information Services in Academic Libraries

    Adding Value in the Digital World
    • 1st Edition
    • Lesley Farmer
    • English
    This book examines the questions: how academic libraries provide value-added reference and information services in the digital age. It provides best practices from a global perspective. The book starts by looking at the information needs and info-seeking behaviours of university students and faculty. Then it examines the use cycle: consumer, instruction, and producer. It examines the resource cycle: collection development, instructor, maintenance. What are the essential elements of reference: orientation, instruction, collaborative planning, products?

  • Digital Rights Management

    The Problem of Expanding Ownership Rights
    • 1st Edition
    • Christopher May
    • English
    Digital Rights Management examines the social context of new digital rights management (DRM) technologies in a lively and accessible style. It sets out the scope of DRMs in non-technical terms and then explores the shifts that DRM has produced within the regime of protection of intellectual property rights (IPRs). Focusing on the social norms around the protection of IPRs, it examines the music industry and software development sector to ask whether the protections established by DRM are legitimate and socially beneficial. Using these key examples to establish a more general argument, the books central conclusion is that rather than merely re-establishing threatened rights, the development of DRM has extended the rights of intellectual property owners, and that such an extension violates previous carefully balanced political compromises as regards the maintenance of the public domain.

  • Knowledge, Information and the Business Process

    Revolutionary Thinking or Common Sense?
    • 1st Edition
    • Liz Taylor
    • English
    The key focus of this book is to integrate elements of information and knowledge management, together with the business process and intellectual capital. The book questions some of the fundamental concepts and principles currently used to manage information that revolve around business processes. Specifically, it addresses the argument to more effectively evaluate the contributions of human and systems capital (which are defined) to a process, highlighting the need to make more conscious decisions about what role each will perform in the developed process.

  • A Handbook of Ethical Practice

    A Practical Guide to Dealing with Ethical Issues in information and Library Work
    • 1st Edition
    • David McMenemy + 2 more
    • English
    This book looks at all of the ethical issues facing information and library professionals in one overarching, and practically-focused, text. As such, it is of great benefit to both practitioners and to LIS students. The focus of the book is two-fold: (1) It contains a detailed discussion of the issues that impact on the day-today practice of information workers in the 21st century; and (2) contains case studies discussing potential solutions to ethical problems faced. The book provides sections which work like flowcharts leading from ethical issues through decision points to proposed solutions based on the literature/case studies. This is a highly useful resource that provides appropriate access to potential solutions for day-to-day queries.

  • Librarianship and Human Rights

    A Twenty-First Century Guide
    • 1st Edition
    • Toni Samek
    • English
    In this book, the reader will encounter a myriad of urgent library and information voices reflecting contemporary local, national, and transnational calls to action on conflicts generated by failures to acknowledge human rights, by struggles for recognition and representation, by social exclusion, and the library institution’s role therein. These voices infuse library and information work worldwide into social movements and the global discourse of human rights, they depict library and information workers as political actors, they offer some new possibilities for strategies of resistance, and they challenge networks of control. This book’s approach to library and information work is grounded in practical, critical, and emancipatory terms; social action is a central pattern. This book is conceived as a direct challenge to the notion of library neutrality, especially in the present context of war, revolution, and social change. This book, for example, locates library and information workers as participants and interventionists in social conflicts. The strategies for social action worldwide documented in this book were selected because of their connection to elements of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) that relate particularly to core library values, information ethics, and global information justice.

  • The Academic Research Library in A Decade of Change

    • 1st Edition
    • Reg Carr
    • English
    This book starts from the premise that the last decade has brought more changes for the academic research library than any ever previously known. The book provides an authoritative overview and analysis of the issues and challenges affecting academic research libraries from the closing years of the 20th century onwards. While the focus on this period of white water change is primarily British, with a number of case studies based on the transformative initiatives of the UKs Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and its seminal Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib), as well as on the Bodleian Libraries far-reaching responses to the complex demands of the digital age, the issues themselves are presented in their global context, with implications drawn for research libraries everywhere.

  • Knowledge Management

    Social, Cultural and Theoretical Perspectives
    • 1st Edition
    • Ruth Rikowski
    • English
    This book focuses on various aspects of KM - including social, political and philosophical perspectives; practical perspectives; cross-cultural perspectives and theoretical perspectives. It concludes with an alternative view on KM, emphasising how KM helps to ensure the success of the knowledge revolution.

  • Integrated Security Systems Design

    Concepts, Specifications, and Implementation
    • 1st Edition
    • Thomas L. Norman
    • English
    Integrated Security Systems Design is a one-stop resource for security directors, consultants, engineers and installation managers who are interested in providing the best possible security while saving millions in improved operations efficiency. An integrated security system is a system that has been incorporated into other programs (such as Access Control, Private Branch Exchanges, Human Relations, Security Video, and Intercommunications) to perform tasks in a manner consistent with corporate or agency policies and procedures. This book explains how to accomplish such integration, thereby saving a company both time and money.Integrated Security Systems Design is arranged to go from the strategic to the technical to the tactical. The strategic section covers the why of design, the technical section explains how it’s done, and the tactical section provides the cultural knowledge that leads to project success. Norman also offers guidance in avoiding pitfalls out of which legal action have arisen. Many of the subjects covered, such as how to make a security system invisible on an Information Technology System network, include material not available in any other book.

  • The Future of the Book in the Digital Age

    • 1st Edition
    • Bill Cope + 1 more
    • English
    With contributions from some of the world's leading authorities, this publication considers the future of the book in the digital age. As more books are published than ever before, this timely publication addresses a range of critically important themes relating to the book - including the present and future for publishing, libraries, literacy and learning in the information society. In the early 1990s the printed word appeared to be facing a terminal crisis, threatened from all sides by new media and other forms of entertainment. Subsequently the book has proved to be resilient in the face of these challenges, confounding the predictions of those who saw its replacement, whilst digital technology is providing mechanisms that enhance our ability to produce and distribute printed books. New developments, such as the growth of self-publishing and print on demand, and initiatives from major players such as Amazon and Google, mean that the printed book is in the middle of great changes.

  • Emerging Viruses in Human Populations

    • 1st Edition
    • Volume 16
    • Edward Tabor
    • English
    Infectious diseases are an ever present threat to humans. In recent years, the threat of these emerging viruses has been greater than ever before in human history, due in large part to global travel by larger numbers of people, and to a lesser extent to disruptions in the interface between developed and undeveloped areas. The emergence of new deadly viruses in human populations during recent decades has confirmed this risk. They remain the third leading cause of deaths in the US and the second world-wide. Emerging Viruses in Human Populations provides a comprehensive review of viruses that are emerging or that threaten to emerge among human populations in the twenty-first century. It discusses the apprehension over emerging viruses that has intensified due to concerns about bioterrorism.

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