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Books in Social sciences and humanities

    • Intruder Alarms

      • 3rd Edition
      • Gerard Honey
      • English
      Intruder Alarms provides a definitive and fully up-to-date guide to the specification, systems design, integration, installation and maintenance of intruder alarm systems. It has been written to be the essential handbook for installation engineers and security professionals working in this rapidly expanding and developing area. The third edition includes new material on systems integration, digital systems, wireless and remote signalling technologies, and electrical safety.The revision has brought coverage fully in line with the new European standards (EN50131 / BS EN 50131-1), with their implications summarised in a new appendix. The coverage has also been carefully matched to the requirements of the new Knowledge of Security and Emergency Alarm Systems from City & Guilds (1852).
    • Strategic Challenges and Strategic Responses

      The Transformation of Chinese State-Owned Enterprises
      • 1st Edition
      • Jifu Wang
      • English
      This book focuses on the strategic challenges, strategic responses, and strategies for China's state-owned enterprises (SOE), which face significant challenges from a nationwide economic transformation towards a market economy, from rapid globalization and from increasing industrial competition. The book is based on research which has identified the dominant challenges and forces for change in China, the nature of SOE responses to those forces, and SOE performance in making the necessary transformations to compete in a global business environment.
    • 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?
    • 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.
    • Corporate Literacy

      Discovering the Senses of the Organisation
      • 1st Edition
      • Anne Kauhanen-Simanainen
      • English
      This book introduces a new facet for information and knowledge management: Corporate Literacy refers to the comprehensive literacy that companies and communities need in the networked, fast changing and complex environment. The views relating to organisations and information are changing along with the changes in the operating and information environment. The concept of literacy is also expanding. It cannot anymore be observed only from an individual point of view but the attention has to be transferred to communal skills. Based of these shared skills the organisation is able to build its own information architecture and to offer its information resources for use. This book will tell the reader how Corporate Literacy is created and what kind of a strategy can be used to develop it. The book includes information architecture of a literate organisation and new roles of information professionals.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.