This report caps an 8-year initiative that has had as its goal the recruitment and formation of scholarly committees to investigate the state of decay and preservation of collections within their separate disciplines. The Commission began to investigate strategies for preservation selection in 1988. By 1995, the Commission had worked with scholars…

The fissures, if not chasms, between two recently published histories of the field of communication demonstrate that teachers/scholars of communication lack an agreed-upon recollection of their social and intellectual origins. The influence of muckrakers has been so great that, paradoxically, they seem easy to ignore in constructing a history of…

Discusses the role of philosophy in universities today--both as a separate discipline and as a contributor to higher education. (ND)

A justification and explication of the existence of elites in the academic world, but especially in the humanities where they perform a practical and necessary function for the enrichment of the mankind, is presented. (JH)

Designed for use as supplementary instructional material in a cultural anthropology course, this learning module introduces the idea that anthropology is composed of a number of subdisciplines and that cultural anthropology has numerous subfields which are the specialty areas for many practicing anthropologists. Beginning with a general discussion…

This paper examines author productivity as a function of subject breadth using literature-productive engineers--subject breadth is defined as a measure of an author's tendency to move outside one or more closely allied subject areas within a discipline. Subjects for the study were chosen at random from the 1971 author index of The Engineering…

The author claims that the nature of the social sciences is to combine interpretive and empirical approaches in an attempt to understand human thought and behavior. He views the domain of social sciences as being different from that of the humanities or the natural sciences. Social scientists test interpretations by considering the extent to which…

The author describes historical demography in terms of the major techniques used in the field. He assesses its importance and relationship to both demography and history as separate disciplines. (Author/AV)

The relationships between literacy, intellect, and university disciplines are explored through examples attempting to distinguish intellect from intelligence and the high-grade literacy of university disciplines from its commonplace counterpart. (MT)

This annotated bibliography of recent articles and books on academic rankings updates an article in the Spring 1986 "RQ." Items are listed by subject and ranking in general; individual guides; subject areas including accounting, advertising, biogeography, business, communications, data communications, economics, music, publishing,…

Proposes scientific theory of the subject matter of library and information science and how it can be organized in terms of the function of documents and their basic use. A hierarchy of classes of documents is described including one, several, or all of the following: information, creativity, understanding, and explanation. (Author/EM)

Presents a framework for developing principles to clarify the intellectual problems and materials that constitute the core concerns of Black Studies. Defines two key concepts: "systematicity" (transformation and historical periodism) and "thematicity" (duality and pre-generic quest-myth of freedom and literacy. (Author/KH)

The role that speculative literature can play in futures studies is examined. For example, speculative fiction makes the future accessible to a wide audience. The best futurist work springs not from a denial of historicity, but from a reflexive appreciation of it, and reveals often overlooked aspects of reality. (RM)

Defines the legitimacy of speech/language pathology and audiology as an academic field of study within a college of liberal arts and sciences. (PD)