This paper explores the reasons behind the omission of historic acoustic values from heritage assessments in Australia. Best practice dictates that all cultural heritage values associated with significant places should be assessed in order to make informed conservation and management decisions. However, the multisensory nature of aesthetics has been reframed in guidance documentation in ways that run counter to the primary frame. Conventions that have developed around the way places are assessed also work against comprehensive identification of values. As a result, the consideration of aesthetics in cultural heritage is limited to contemporary visual qualities. Furthermore, because the assessment of historic value takes a diachronic rather than synchronic approach, we have little knowledge of the places past communities valued for the sounds they experienced there. Research into landscape preference and acoustic ecology highlights the importance of identifying the inherent acoustic dimension of places and the role sound plays in developing a sense of place. Two landscape areas in Western Australia's south-west with historic acoustic values, the Boranup Sand Patch and the Lower Reaches of the Blackwood River, illustrate how historic soundscapes can provide insightful contrasts and resonances with contemporary values, and how vulnerable such places are when the sound of place is overlooked in land management policies.
PurposeTo share information and insights from the 2006 Digital Archives in Science and Engineering Resources (DASER) and American Society for information Science and Technology Conferences.Design/methodology/approachThe article is a description of the main highlights.FindingsInstitutional and professional challenges face libraries and librarians as they consider a more electronic environment both as the preference of users and due to the new availability of resources that are consistently being released that way. How to create space for new academic functions and student needs is a primary goal at many institutions. Many ideas were floated about ways that is being done at large research universities.Originality/valueThe informal nature of the DASER Summit lent to much collegiality and sharing of information and could have extended a lot longer if time allowed.
The 2004 Annual Conference of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) had the theme of Managing and Enhancing Information: Cultures and Conflicts. Judging from the crowds filling certain sessions, this year's hot topics are: Google, blogs, wikis, virtual reference and the Semantic Web. J.C. Herz, Sunday's plenary speaker, is the New York Times' first computer game critic (www.gbn.com/Person BioDisplayServlet.srv?pi=24625). She is principle of Joystick Nation, Inc. a design practice that applies the principles of game design to products, services and learning systems. JC's focus is multiplayer interaction design, and systems that leverage the intrinsic characteristics of networked communication. Her clients include multinational corporations, nonprofit organizations and the US Defense Department. She spoke of how group interactions on the world wide web generate communication and acknowledgement and useful information for people. Google leverages what computers do best and what humans do best, that is, create context.`I nformation is not always explicit. Writers and teachers make embedded knowledge translated and manifest.'' Blogging soldiers in Iraq have created the Mudville Gazette web logs and Milblogs. The military reacted negatively at first, but now tolerates these online diaries, each soldier's description of``My War.'' Visit the Mudville Gazette at www.mudvillegazette.com.
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