ANCIL in action: progress updates on A New Curriculum for Information Literacy

Secker & Coonan’s 2011 research on A New Curriculum for Information Literacy (ANCIL) positions information literacy as a vital, holistic and institution-wide element in academic teaching and learning. Rather than taking a competency-based approach in which abilities and performance levels are delineated prescriptively, ANCIL is founded on a perception of information literacy as a continuum of skills, competences, behaviours and values around information, centred in an individual learner engaged in a specific task or moving towards a particular goal. ANCIL offers both micro- and macro-level approaches to reviewing the information literacy support offered in an institution. With its emphasis on active, reflective and transferable elements in learning, ANCIL lends itself well to practical course design and lesson planning. By reviewing the structure and content of individual sessions through the ANCIL lens, it is possible to enhance information literacy teaching significantly even where provision is restricted to one-shot or front-loaded training sessions. In addition, ANCIL’s holistic mapping of information literacy, together with the interprofessional and collaborative approach this entails, allows departments or whole institutions to audit where, how and when provision is offered to and encountered by the student in the course of his or her learning career.The original ANCIL project research was supported by the Arcadia Programme at Cambridge University Library

From Glyndebourne to Glastonbury:The Impact of British Music Festivals

Festivals are at the heart of British music and at the heart of the British music industry. They form an essential part of the worlds of rock, classical, folk and jazz, forming regularly occurring pivot points around which musicians, audiences, and festival organisers plan their lives. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the purpose of this report is to chart and critically examine available writing about the impact of British music festivals, drawing on both academic and ‘grey’/cultural policy literature in the field. The review presents research findings under the headings of: •economy and charity; •politics and power; •temporality and transformation; •creativity: music and musicians; •place-making and tourism; •mediation and discourse; •health and well-being; and •environment: local and global. It concludes with observations on the impact of academic research on festivals as well as a set of recommendations for future research

The impact of (jazz) festivals:An Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research report

Festivals are an essential part of the jazz world, forming regularly occurring pivot points around which jazz musicians, audiences and organizers plan their lives. Funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, the purpose of this report is to chart and critically examine available writing about the impact of jazz festivals, drawing on both academic and 'grey'/cultural policy literature in the field. The review presents research findings under the headings of economic impact; socio-political impact; temporal impact and intensification and transformation of experience; creative impact--music and musicians; discovery and audience development; place-making; the mediation of jazz festivals; and environmental impact. It concludes with a set of recommendations for future research, which identifes gaps in the feld. To accompany the article, a 100-entry 40,000-word annotated bibliography has also been produced, which is freely accessible online

Why concert promoters matter

Forming a companion piece to Frith’s 2007 article on why live music matters, this paper argues that there is a need to refine accounts of the music industries to reflect live music’s growing dominance. It does so by focusing on the rock/pop concert promoter and posits that in contrast to traditional definitions, the role of the promoter is astonishingly flexible and adaptable. The authors argue that the promoter necessarily ‘wears many hats’ and offer three promotional models to understand the work that promoters do. To illustrate this and to understand the development of live music promotion in the UK from 1955 onwards, the article compares and contrasts historical research with contemporary ethnography

Music From Out There, In Here:25 Years of the London Jazz Festival

Webster and McKay have pieced together a fascinating jigsaw puzzle of archival material, interviews, and stories from musicians, festival staff and fans alike. Including many evocative images, the book weaves together the story of the festival wit the history of its home city, London, touching on broader social topics such as gender, race, politics, and the search for the meaning of jazz. They also trace the forgotten history of London as a vibrant city of jazz festivals going as far back as the 1940s

Evolution of damped Lyman alpha kinematics and the effect of spatial resolution on 21-cm measurements

We have investigated the effect of spatial resolution on determining pencil-beam like velocity widths and column densities in galaxies. Three 21-cm datasets are used, the HIPASS galaxy catalogue, a subset of HIPASS galaxies with ATCA maps and a high-resolution image of the LMC. Velocity widths measured from 21-cm emission in local galaxies are compared with those measured in intermediate redshift Damped Lyman alpha (DLA) absorbers. We conclude that spatial resolution has a severe effect on measuring pencil-beam like velocity widths in galaxies. Spatial smoothing by a factor of 240 is shown to increase the median velocity width by a factor of two. Thus any difference between velocity widths measured from global profiles or low spatial resolution 21-cm maps at z=0 and DLAs at z>1 cannot unambiguously be attributed to galaxy evolution. The effect on column density measurements is less severe and the values of dN/dz from local low-resolution 21-cm measurements are expected to be overestimated by only ~10 per cent.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS letter

Comparative genome-centric analysis reveals seasonal variation in the function of coral reef microbiomes

Microbially mediated processes contribute to coral reef resilience yet, despite extensive characterisation of microbial community variation following environmental perturbation, the effect on microbiome function is poorly understood. We undertook metagenomic sequencing of sponge, macroalgae and seawater microbiomes from a macroalgae-dominated inshore coral reef to define their functional potential and evaluate seasonal shifts in microbially mediated processes. In total, 125 high-quality metagenome-assembled genomes were reconstructed, spanning 15 bacterial and 3 archaeal phyla. Multivariate analysis of the genomes relative abundance revealed changes in the functional potential of reef microbiomes in relation to seasonal environmental fluctuations (e.g. macroalgae biomass, temperature). For example, a shift from Alphaproteobacteria to Bacteroidota-dominated seawater microbiomes occurred during summer, resulting in an increased genomic potential to degrade macroalgal-derived polysaccharides. An 85% reduction of Chloroflexota was observed in the sponge microbiome during summer, with potential consequences for nutrition, waste product removal, and detoxification in the sponge holobiont. A shift in the Firmicutes:Bacteroidota ratio was detected on macroalgae over summer with potential implications for polysaccharide degradation in macroalgal microbiomes. These results highlight that seasonal shifts in the dominant microbial taxa alter the functional repertoire of host-associated and seawater microbiomes, and highlight how environmental perturbation can affect microbially mediated processes in coral reef ecosystems.Australian Government Department of Industry, Innovation and Science; Advance Queensland PhD Scholarship Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority Management Award National Environmental Science Program (NESP)info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio