Abstract This paper serves to identify the features of online catalogues for children, such as the OPACs of the Science Library Catalogue and the Kid's Catalogue. The paper then compares and contrasts these two forms of catalogues in terms of training children to use them.
This paper reviews Jack Sweetman's "American Naval History: 1775 to Present (2nd edition)", which discusses the key role that the U.S. Navy has played from the War of Independence through the current conflicts in the Gulf.
775 words (approx. 3.1 pages), 0 sources, 2004, $ 27.95
Abstract This book is both a straightforward catalogue of sea-borne battles and an analysis of the significance of major events. The author points out that another important aspect of this book is that it also provides information about other important issues surrounding the nation's naval forces, including strategy, ways in which military affairs are embedded in and affected by political currents, and kinds of weapons, especially nuclear weapons, since the end of the Cold War. The paper states that the history of the United States would have been very different, indeed, had not the U.S. military proved to be effective and innovative.
From the Paper "While one might think that such explanations would be most useful to us in terms of the older engagements that Sweetman discusses, they are in fact most often useful for the most recent engagements because these are events that we are more familiar with and that we think that we understand the context of. This book reminds us that simply because something is nearer to us in time does not mean that we are in fact any closer to a complete understanding of it. Without ever insulting the reader's intelligence, Sweetman provides enough information for even a person entirely ignorant of history to understand what is going on."
Abstract This paper examines how the cost of releasing new commercial records is high and how once the public profile of an album in its primary release dies away, it often becomes uneconomical for the record label to maintain support for that release. It covers the main strategies used by record labels to generate income from back-catalogues and looks at topics such as compilation albums, re-issues and retail mechanisms.
From the Paper "The release of a "Greatest Hits" is not necessarily a gravestone marking the end of an artist's career and it is now likely that a greatest hits compilation may be superseded by a new album. There may even be multiple greatest hits released for one act; Madonna's "Immaculate Collection" topped the British album chart in December of 1990 but still managed to re-enter the chart in January of 2001, peaking at number 21. In November of the same year Madonna released her second greatest hits album ?GHV2: Greatest Hits Volume 2 ? The Best Songs of a Decade? which reached number 2."
Tags: album, business, commercial, mechanism, record
Abstract This paper explains that oral history is a record of individual human lives and experiences transmuted through the filtering prism of individual narrative and the human voice that is catalogued or arranged by oral historians to reveal more about the emotional and factual texture of a particular period of human life. The author points out that, rather than the analytical lens of history, the medium of oral history provides a discursive, meandering, but emotionally connective way of accessing how history was experienced during the time it was experienced, rather than simply how history affects our lives today in the eyes of philosophers, pundits, and professional historians. The paper adds that now history must be academically validated and objective, which has caused some historians to state that the idea of oral history is a contradiction in terms.
From the Paper "The multifaceted nature of presenting oral narratives as a history, with all of their contradictions, enables historical understanding as a whole to be much richer. By interviewing many individuals, a historian may work against possible biases within individual perspectives. By presenting different perspectives, the reader may now judge the events and the credibility of the different sources, while still gaining a sense of the emotional intensity of what it was like to ?be there.? Presenting a variety of narratives, as done in Dublin and Licht's article on the miners, as well as in Central City Blues, also undercuts yet another criticism of oral history as a technique, that it is more an encapsulation of the rapport between the interviewer and the interviewee than a genuine rendering of how the individual was, at the point in time he or she was describing."
Abstract In his poem, "Beds", Charlie Smith charts his journey through addiction, through a catalogue or 'heaping figure' of beds he has known throughout his life. The paper examines this technique and the importance of metaphor as tool for raking through challenging subject matter.
From the Paper "Whatever one chooses to call the technique, Smith's handling of it is masterly. He takes an everyday object and uses it as a vehicle through which to explore a situation and its accompanying emotions. He continually implodes the object through constant re-inspection, "heaping" one kind of bed upon the other, exhausts it, turning it over and over, examining it ever closer until it ceases to be merely a bed and becomes a metaphor for each step of his journey. Smith's catalogue of beds are the landmarks of his recovery."
Abstract This essay discusses Susan Griffin's book "The Book of the Courtesans: A Catalogue of Their Virtues" as a deep and penetrating look into the history of the courtesan profession. The author asserts that Griffin's primary contention in this book is that courtesans have a special place in history; they were neither prostitutes nor part of the immoral underground of European society, but rather a prominent display of femininity during many different eras of Western history. The author also gives a positive personal opinion towards the book.
From the Paper "Griffin's book focuses on many different stylistic and literary techniques that help to make this both an entertaining and fluid narrative. Her organization of the book is very succinct; she offers the purpose of her book in the introduction by stating clearly that she intends to explain the artistic and aesthetic nature of the courtesan. She continues to advance this position through each following chapter and makes her organizational scheme very understandable. Each chapter works to enhance her position and defend her thesis. Although it may appear through this review that her work is academic in nature, the opposite is true. She carefully hides her thesis and the progression of her 'evidence' through the narrative biographies of famous courtesans throughout the ages. She tells the stories of Veronica Franco of 16th century Venice, Madame de Pompadour of Versailles and many other such courtesans who were able to entrench themselves into the heart of Western society. Through their stories she shows how they practiced their craft and were able to gain 'liberation' from society as a result of their prowess. Her story telling technique makes this narrative extremely digestible and makes her arguments very subtly throughout her work."
Abstract This paper discusses the JC Penney Corporation, explaining that it is a subsidiary of the parent corporation JC Penney Company as well as one of North America's largest and most well known retailers. The paper further reports that JC Penney operations extend across several sales channels including traditional department stores, retail outlets, catalogue sales, and e-commerce channels and that .C. Penney employees over 150,000 people across North and South America while operating in excess of 1,000 unique store locations. Additionally, J.C. Penney, while having lost market share in past years to its retail competitors such as Wal-Mart and Target Stores, J.C. Penney has maintained its position as the United States' largest catalogue merchant under its JC Penney Catalogue division which includes its e-commerce sales channel.
Abstract The Kaulong peoples of Papua New Guinea devote their lives to moving from the lowest status to politically "big men" and "big women" by displaying their accumulation of knowledge at all-night singing competitions, ending in a pig sacrifice and feasting. This paper shows how, in the course of her fieldwork with the Kaulong, who live on the island of New Britain in Papua New Guinea, Jane Goodall discovered and catalogued that everything of importance to them; every event, relationship, and transaction was rooted in their constant quest for recognition as human beings. The paper explains how Goodall takes considerable time to determine both the Kaulong definition of human and catalogue the tribal rituals and relationships that build into the Kaulong definition.
Paper Outline
Introduction
The Benefit of Goodall's Research
The Environment
Knowledge Management and the Identity of the Self
Kinship and Family
Courtship and Marriage
Sexuality, Gender and Family Order
Economics
Taro
Pork
Gold Lipped Pearl Shells
Sorcery
Culture and Ceremony
Bibliography
From the Paper "The courtship and marriage ritual among the Kaulong is viewed as adversarial to the man. The females in the tribe begin the courting ritual, and many men feel as if marriage will ruin them. The male's identity, as seen in the list of attributed above, is based on traveling, hunting, fighting, and being an individual with great knowledge. A marriage relationship hinders men from freely pursuing many of these traits. For these reasons the women chase the men, at times pursuing them with sticks and whips. Men are beaten by an interested female. Some men put off marriage until late in life. Others, who are caught unwillingly, will spend their first weeks in a marriage hut surrounded by brothers of the new bride. These brothers will not leave until the man pays them off, and assures them that he will not desert his new bride in favor of roaming the jungle."
Abstract History and politics, at least according to most college course catalogues, are separate disciplines. 'Women's Studies' also forms its own separate category, apart from these two disciplines. Yet in her work "Gender and the Politics of History", Joan Wallach Scott makes it clear that for as long as women's studies has existed as a discipline, feminist historians have suggested that all three elements are intertwined in a proper analysis of history.
From the Paper "Scott writes her work both in response to these feminist historians, and as a part of the tradition of the rash of academic and popular womens writing about women in history in recent years. (15) Although it is impossible to reduce these writings on women's histories to a particular political stance she suggests a certain commonality between all of them in their lack of commonality. She pinpoints a problem that arises because of the lack of a tradition of historiography when writing about gender. Historians with political projects, such as Marxists, employ different historiographic techniques than those mainly interested in studying the construction of the feminine narrative of reproduction, and how women have attempted to control their bodies throughout history, for example. (16) "
The following paper discusses the Universal Decimal Classification system which is based on Decimal Classification which was designed for the arrangement and indexing of books on shelves, cards in catalogues and clippings.
Abstract The following paper examines the way in which the Universal Decimal Classification introduces the idea of auxiliary connections and discusses the way in which this system works by dividing the whole field of knowledge into 10 main classes. The writer discusses the success of the Universal Decimal Classification which is based on it's use of decimal notation.
From the Paper "The Universal Decimal Classification has a feature called the synthetic principle. This works by allocating a consistent notation to recurrent series of concepts that are arranged in consistent orders. For example in class 4 which is to do with philology the order of sub-classes and the notation representing them is the same for each language. For example 425 for English grammar, 435 for German grammar, etc.). The geographical location of countries is also consistent. For example British history could be 942, so German history would be 943; and 328.42 is British legislation, with German legislation being 328.43.
The synthetic principle allows for over 200 different languages to share the same in depth coverage that English usually exclusively enjoys. This principle also allows for great increases in the range of subdivision with no printing costs."
An examination of the opportunities, challenges and obstacles for online selling including history, examples, comparison to offline commerce, business models, catalogues, consumer navigation, credit card security, "shopping cart" and more.
5,850 words (approx. 23.4 pages), 14 sources, 2000, $ 135.95
Abstract This analysis shall attempt to discern the development, promise, problems, and implications of electronic commerce, with a particular emphasis on electronic retail selling over the World Wide Web. It shall attempt to determine the chief issues facing electronic retail commerce and provide some general, preliminary guidance that would be useful to the retailer when seeking to understand the implications of e-commerce for his or her business.
From the Paper "The Virtual Storefront
" A Survey of Online Retail Shopping:
Prospects and Challenges
Introduction
This analysis shall attempt to discern the development, promise, problems, and implications of electronic commerce, with a particular emphasis on electronic retail selling over the World Wide Web. It shall attempt to determine the chief issues facing electronic retail commerce and provide some general, preliminary guidance that would be useful to the retailer when seeking to understand the implications of e-commerce for his or her business.
The essay begins with a brief thematic introduction that presents an overview of the growth of electronic retailing, and a..."
Abstract The jewelry industry has changed dramatically over the past decade as 800 numbers and mail order catalogues have shifted to web sites and orders on-line. Jewelers are discovering new ways to benefit from investing in e-commerce to make their sites fully functional and profitable, according to researchers and small businesses experts. The paper examines the market for buying jewelry over the internet. It shows the advantage 'brand names' have over unknown jewelry companies, the type of customer to buy jewelry online and the advantages of implementing e-commerce strategies.
From the Paper "The growth of the online jewelry market is fueled by an increasing amount of jewelry stores selling their products online, the lower prices of online goods, improvements in technology that will enhance online viewing, and the no-pressure atmosphere of online buying (Tracy, 2000). Research shows that brick-and-mortar jewelry retailers who engage in e-commerce will have a significant advantage over brick-and mortars from other industries that moved online. Brand names and the trust they convey will be the reason for the advantage as they are more important factors with jewelry purchases than other purchases."
Abstract The philosopher Thomas Nagel became famous for his advocacy of the idea that human consciousness and subjective experience cannot be reduced to a discussion of "mere" brain activity and that the human brain is bifurcated into two hemispheres. The paper shows that in his essay on ?Brain Bisection & the Unity of Consciousness,? Nagel stresses that merely because this is the case, the sum or interaction of human being's two brain hemispheres of left and right is essentially greater than the catalogued capabilities of the two parts. Nagel stresses this as proof of his thesis that the human consciousness is more extensive than simply a list of the respective components of the brain's left and right hemispheres. The paper critically analyzes Nagel's view. It also touches on the growing research on gender differences between the interaction of brain hemispheres
From the Paper "Even if human beings are indeed all ?brain,? this does not mean that human beings will not vary in the ways that the different components of their brain interact in an interesting, varied, and compassionate manner. Nagel fears the potential predictability of the human consciousness as reducing the mysteries of human subjectivity to a catalogue of components. But to suggest, for instance, that the right brain might deal more with abstraction, as to the hemispherical components of left brain which are said to deal more with verbal capacity, can hardly predict the relative ability of any individual to use those abstractive or verbal capacities."
Abstract E.L. Doctorow has always been a writer who juxtaposes fictional events with historical ones. "The Book of Daniel" is no exception. While the character of Daniel is fictional, the events depicted--a thinly disguised version of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg trial, the communist scare fanned by Senator McCarthy, the Viet Nam War--are all rooted in history. Daniel's journey then is both historical and personal, ricocheting between the past and the present as he attempts to find meaning in the events of his own life and those of his culture. "The Book of Daniel" is like its Biblical counterpart, part lamentation and part exhortation. History is a catalogue of a "time of trouble" in which some figures of the past will awake to 'everlasting contempt' while others turn to righteousness. Daniel struggles with both, an inherited past and an uncertain future. In the end, however, he finds his way.
Examines National Socialism's effect on ordinary life in Germany during the rise of Hitler to power, using Brecht's "Fear and Misery of the Third Reich" as a reference.
2,150 words (approx. 8.6 pages), 7 sources, 2002, $ 80.95
Abstract "Fear and Misery of the Third Reich" was written by Brecht in the late 1930's and completed shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. In a series of twenty-four self-contained scenes or 'playlets', he purported to chronicle the period between Hitler's installation as German Chancellor in January 1933 and the Nazi entry into Vienna following the Anschluss with Austria in 1938. Brecht's aim was to demonstrate how deeply and disastrously National Socialism had effected ordinary life in Germany during this period. As he himself described it, this play is, "...a catalogue of attitudes, the attitudes of keeping silent, looking over one's shoulder, feeling frightened etc. - behavior in a dictatorship".
