There are hundreds of alphabetic texts in Zapotec languages dating back to the 16th century. Today, however, Zapotec speakers are generally unable to read these texts, due to lack of access to the texts and an unfamiliarity with the orthographic practices. Moreover, significant changes have taken place in the grammar in the intervening centuries.…[Read more]

The purpose of this research is to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the legal information profession within law firm libraries in Britain and Ireland. As the pandemic only began the year prior to commencing this research, few research studies have been conducted on the topic, thereby a clear opening for this study emerged. This…[Read more]

Open access (OA) has been a force for change in the dissemination of scholarly research. However, movement towards this form of publishing has varied between disciplines as, for example, research concerning law is somewhat behind the natural and social sciences (Severin, Egger, Eve, and Hürlimann, 2018). OA resources can be defined as…[Read more]

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a growing phenomenon that has increasingly moved into public consciousness with the creation of tangible products such as Siri and smart cars (Cox, Pinfield and Rutter, 2019, p. 418). Fernandez (2016, p. 5) defines AI as “a group of technologies that attempt to enable computers to solve problems in more dynamic w…[Read more]

Public libraries in the United Kingdom have faced significant closures since the introduction of austerity in 2010, with this trend predicted to continue. The current tools used to measure the value of UK libraries are crude, insufficient and grounded in competitive market values that focus on numbers. Better methods are needed to capture and…[Read more]

Spanish Abstract: Proponemos, en contraposición a la noción de ideología corriente en la crítica cultural y ejemplificada aquí por el libro de Teun A. van Dijk “Ideología: Un enfoque multidisciplinario” (Gedisa, 1999), una noción de ideología más interaccional, más dialógica y más unida a las situaciones efectivas en las que la ideología s…[Read more]

This essay will explore the impact personal style has on information behaviour, with
particular reference to information seeking and subsequent information searching, and to
what extent personal style is related to academic subject choice. Through this exploration,
this essay will suggest the provision of adaptive tools, customised user…[Read more]

Libraries and information services have long since been champions of equitable access to
information. As the popularity of open access grows, the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries,
Archives and Museums) sector investigates how to further develop their service and enrich
their collections through knowledge collaboration. With the increased…[Read more]

The pervasiveness and increasing usage of digital technologies and information
communication technologies (ICTs) influences not only how we view the world around us,
but how we view ourselves. We are plugged in to an incessant stream of information and
networked to other informational entities – or inforgs (Floridi, 2010) – and in order to…[Read more]

Introduction: Open Science (OS) is a movement within the field of science to enable the free accessibility of honestly generated and truthful scientific research possessing the capabilities of reproducibility and re-use with the input of and benefit for all stakeholders of science. Purpose: The purpose of this masters dissertation it to…[Read more]

Background: COVID-19 has changed many aspects of life and work and meant altering or developing new processes to meet those changes and continue to deliver services. This has also been the case within academic libraries, who although were already largely shifting towards digital collections, found they had to continue to deliver services to…[Read more]

Public libraries, while providing a standardised general service, are often tailored to the communities they serve. This relies on the visibility and understanding of social groups within the local population. Across the country, the social, cultural, political, and historical local contexts influence the size and/or prominence of the LGBTQ+…[Read more]

My notes (taken c. 1990) on Geoffrey Leech’s ‘Principles of Pragmatics’ (London: Longman, 1983). Pagination on the left; my parenthetical comments in italics.

Starting from a review of the recent bibliography, we reflect on the role of libraries in promoting innovation. Training in media, informational and digital competencies is considered as a playing field in which librarians, educators and Administration have to come together, contributing their experience from complementary perspectives. Based on…[Read more]

For almost as long as there has been recorded information, there has been a perception that humanity has been overloaded by it. Concerns about “too much to read” have been expressed for many centuries, and made more urgent since the arrival of ubiquitous digital information in the late 20th century. As society fully experiences Floridi’s Fourt…[Read more]

This article presents a detailed examination of the benefits, challenges, and purpose of conducting a doctoral-level literature review. The article analyzes both the cognitive neurolinguistic processing challenges attending the assimilation and synthesis of large volumes of new information and the metacognitive knowledge strategies needed to…[Read more]

Focusing on the work of John McWhorter and, to a lesser extent, Peter Trudgill, this paper critically examines some common themes in language complexity research from the perspective of intellectual history. The present-day conception that increase in language complexity is somehow a “natural” process which is disturbed under the “ab…[Read more]

While it has been known for a long time that human languages can change in various ways, it was only in the early 19th century that scholars realized that certain aspects of language change proceed in a surprisingly regular manner, allowing us to reconstruct historical stages of languages which have never been documented in written sources. The…[Read more]

Journal of Historical Linguistics, Volume 11, Issue 2, 357 – 366.

Kaluza’s law is a proposed restriction in the metre of Beowulf against the resolution of light-heavy sequences: words like cyning ‘king’ can only resolve and count as the equivalent of a single heavy syllable under more restricted circumstances than can words such as wudu ‘wood’. There has been debate about how to define these ‘restrict…[Read more]