The study investigated the status of school library management manuals, analyzed the contents, and elucidated general trends as well as differences among manuals depending on their target readership. We distributed questionnaires to prefectural boards of education, boards of education belonging to local governments in Tokyo, and prefectural school library associations; 70 responses were collected (response rate: 45.4%). The analysis revealed that many school library management manuals intended to present ideas for activating school library management. It also revealed differences in what different manuals emphasized depending on their target readership. Manuals for teacher librarians and teachers in charge of libraries had a tendency to serve as guides for educating people on effective use of school libraries, while manuals with a broader readership provided devices that facilitated utilization of the manuals by various readers regardless of background and experience.

View full abstract

 Home video recorders have spread over the country. Now people are able to watch TV program in their favorite time utilizing the recording function. In other words home video recorders facilitate 'time-shifted viewing' of TV broadcasts. In addition nowadays people can watch some TV programs on video-sharing sites of the internet, which diversify peoples' watching style of TV programs. This study has done a survey for examining how people conceive home video recorders under such changing environment.
 As a result our survey confirms that the groups using video sharing sites tend to record TV programs and then put the programs into removable disk more frequently than the group using the sites less. It also shows that five perception patterns toward TV watching underpinned in the precedent paper are associated with the usage of home video recorders, and that the cohort with keen interest in TV programs is likely to record and playback programs more often other cohorts.

View full abstract

 Purpose: In order to enable to compare journal impact across subject fields, we proposed a source normalized indicator "SCJIF" considering the difference in citation practice (references per article) among citing journals, and examined the effect of normalization. Method: We calculated the SCJIFs of journals belonging to two subject fields, Clinical Neurology(CN) and Neurosciences(NS), which are near in subject but differ in the journal impact factors (JIFs) from each other, using the data of the Journal Citation Report Science Edition 2009. Results and Discussion: The JIFs of journals in NS were higher on average than those in CN, but the difference was reduced in the SCJIFs due to more references per article in NS than in CN. The difference in the JIF within each field (CN and NS) was also reduced in the SCJIF. This is supposed to be because some subdivided regions that have different citation practice exist in a field. Conclusion: The SCJIF gives a view different from one given by the JIF, by taking in consideration the different citation practice among and within subject fields.

View full abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the present conditions and problems on copyright-education in the management of the public teacher training institutes in Japan. Research method is a questionnaire survey for the superintendents in charge of copyright-education of the public teacher training institutes. As the result of the investigation, we found that the superintendents recognize that it is necessary to solve the knowledge gap on the copyright between teachers and they often infringe the copyright although they have the high spirit obeying the copyright and enough knowledge on the copyright. Consequently, we propose five solutions and point out the need to improve the perception of superintendent's recognition for the result.

View full abstract

The concept of "Close-and-Open" is the living system condition in which the system operates self-referentially and autonomously in the realities that can be experienced by the system subjectively as accidental failures only after they happened. This paper explains that both heteronomy, or material openness, and autonomy, or informational closure, are the living system condition, referring to Neocybernetics, especially HACS model of Toru Nishigaki. Systems in the information technological environment tend to pursue either openness or closure, although both of them are the living system condition. This paper insists that it is important for such systems to embrace their inherent "Close-and-Open". This paper also provides an interpretation of media art as an art of mediation between closure and openness to compose the "Close-and-Open" systems, especially in the method of Masahiro Miwa's "Reverse-Simulation Music".

View full abstract