Volume 52 Number 2 (May/Jun 2017)
NORAD’s Combat Operations Center: A Distinctively Cold War Environment
Layne Karafantis
(p. 139 - 162)
Abstract
The North American Air Defense Command constructed an innovative command and control room inside of Cheyenne Mountain in the early 1960s. This ambition served Cold War military needs, such as protecting air defense systems from nuclear attack, as well as the political desire to uplift domestic morale. Technological developments implemented in the Combat Operations Center not only satisfied functional requirements but also served image-making objectives and provided foundations for nascent fields in engineering.
Layne Karafantis is the curator of the modern military aviation collection at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. She received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University in the history of science and technology.
Jelena Lakuš and Anita Bajić
(p. 163 - 185)
Abstract
As a form of writing that reveals the diarist’s personality, conveys biographical and genealogical data, contains details of everyday and family life, and provides insight into the past and the sociopolitical and cultural circumstances in which the diarist lived, diaries have been a rich source of information for scholars of various research interests. Diaries that contain a lot of references associated with reading and books are of particular interest to book historians. Based on the content analysis of the diary of Dragojla Jarnević, a famous female author from the period of the Croatian National Revival, this article demonstrates diaries’ research potential as sources for the history of reading.
Jelena Lakuš is an associate professor in the Department of Information Sciences at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Osijek, Croatia. In 2006 she received her PhD in comparative history of central, southeastern, and eastern Europe from the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. Her dissertation is entitled “Books, Society and Culture: Religious and Political Order in Dalmatia (1815-1850).”
Anita Bajić received her MA in library and information sciences in 2013 from the University of Osijek, Croatia. Her master’s thesis is titled “Diary Entries as the Sources for the History of Books and Reading: The Cases of Dragojla Jarnević and Ivana Brlić Mažuranić.”
Plummer Alston Jones, Jr.
(p. 186 - 206)
Abstract
Elizabeth Cleveland Morriss was a progressive adult education reformer and one of several founders of statewide evening school programs for adult literacy and adult elementary education. These evening schools for adults were part of a nationwide grassroots movement established during the Great Depression. Morriss followed in the footsteps of Cora Wilson Stewart, founder of the Moonlight Schools for Adults in Kentucky, established in 1911. While Stewart’s contribution has been well acknowledged and documented, the contribution of Elizabeth Cleveland Morriss, with the Community Schools for Adults in Asheville, Buncombe County, North Carolina, established in 1919, has not been.
Plummer Alston Jones, Jr. is professor of library science at East Carolina University, former chair of ALA EMIERT, and author of two books on public library services with immigrants and minorities: Libraries, Immigrants, and the American Experience (Greenwood, 1999) and Still Struggling for Equality: American Public Library Services with Minorities (Libraries Unlimited, 2004).
How Subjects Matter: The Kinsey Institute’s Sexual Nomenclature: A Thesaurus (1976)
Donna J. Drucker
(p. 207 - 228)
Abstract
Kinsey Institute (KI) librarians created Sexual Nomenclature in the 1970s as a means of improving cataloging accuracy for KI collections. This article traces the two origins of the thesaurus: Alfred Kinsey’s original library organization of the 1940s and 1950s and gay and lesbian library activism in the 1960s and 1970s. Sexual Nomenclature’s authors aimed to create and to deploy sex-specific terms that other libraries could use to improve user access to and knowledge of sex-related materials. An examination of Sexual Nomenclature’s functionality in the past and present demonstrates both the difficulty and necessity of keeping controlled vocabularies for sexological concepts up-to-date.
Donna J. Drucker is a guest lecturer in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. Her previous publications include The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014) and The Machines of Sex Research: Technology and the Politics of Identity, 1945-1985 (Springer, 2014).
Elisabeth Jones
(p. 229 - 263)
Abstract
This article compares and contrasts the assumptions and motivations behind the American public library movement in the nineteenth century to the assumptions and motivations behind the digital library movement of the 1990s and early 2000s. It suggests that although the motivations between these two initiatives were starkly different, their motivations dovetail within the more recent phenomenon of large-scale digitization of the sort pursued by the Google Books Library Project and the Internet Archive. The article also interrogates the role of the public (or lack thereof) in the initial shaping of all three phenomena: public libraries, digital libraries, and large-scale digitization initiatives.
Elisabeth Jones is a consultant at Olive + Goose, a Seattle-based cloud services marketing and instruction consultancy, and a guest lecturer at the University of Washington Information School. Her research explores the social, political, and institutional issues that arise alongside changing modes of information access in the digital world. She holds a PhD in information science from the University of Washington and an MSI in information economics, management, and policy from the University of Michigan.
The Internet in Argentina and Brazil: The Origins of Networking Experiences
Carolina Aguerre
(p. 264 - 294)
Abstract
This article discusses the choices, processes, and patterns that emerged during the first two decades of existence of networking technologies in two South American countries, Argentina and Brazil. Both nations stand out in the region for their implementation of science and technology development programs during the twentieth century. The Internet relies on many layers of infrastructure, technologies, and capacities; this work examines the commonalities and differences around its adoption in these national contexts. The essay combines an institutional analysis, which provides an understanding of the main processes that led to the establishment of the Internet in the two countries, with key concepts from the literature on technology appropriation. The tensions generated by new forms of networking due to the worldwide dissemination of TCP/IP are assessed in the framework of the paradigm shift in telecommunications reform during the 1990s.
Caroline Aguerre, PhD, is adjunct professor in the Department of Social Sciences and affiliate researcher at the Center for Studies on Technology and Society (CETYS), both at the Universidad de San Andrés in Buenos Aires. She is also affiliate researcher at the Internet Policy Observatory at the University of Pennsylvania.
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