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This account demonstrates the key challenges faced in producing engaging educational content for information and communication technologies (ICT) deployed in rural India. The ‘Stills in Sync’ (SIS) project aims to enhance literacy through the revival and proliferation of popular regional folksongs with social awareness themes in rural India. This product entails the use of the Same Language Subtitling (SLS) karaoke feature that won the Worldbank Development Marketplace award in 2002 and the ‘Tech Laureate’ honor from the Technology Museum of Innovation in 2003. This case study highlights the struggles faced in the production process as we sought to negotiate localism with scalability. The paper is meant to stimulate discussion and further research on the process of digitalizing cultural and educational content in muliple languages for literacy gains and empowerment. I attempt to give three‐dimensionality to current buzzwords in education content creation using ICT: localism, relevance and engagement.

This chapter investigates Yiddish-language heavy metal music as a manifestation of postvernacularity. Yiddish, the traditional language of Ashkenazic Jews, is now endangered with a geographically dispersed speaker base and a low rate of transmission to younger generations outside of strictly Orthodox communities. However, as the heritage language of most Ashkenazic Jews, Yiddish continues to play an important symbolic role in contemporary Jewish life even among those who do not speak or understand it. This phenomenon has been termed ‘postvernacularity’ (Shandler, 2006).

Yiddish is associated with a rich tradition of folk songs, popular songs, and ballads. Recent decades have seen a growing interest among younger generations in Yiddish language and culture, including its musical tradition. In addition to musicians specialising in traditional Yiddish song, there are also currently two bands worldwide who have produced a metal album in Yiddish: Gevolt (Israel) and Dibbukim (Sweden). The repertoire of both bands is comprised largely of classic Yiddish songs interpreted in a metal style but retaining the traditional lyrics and melodies.

The fact that these metal bands often choose to reinterpret traditional staples rather than composing original Yiddish songs can be seen as a reflection of the predominantly postvernacular status of Yiddish. The language plays an iconic role for band members and audiences. Concurrently, the fusion of familiar Yiddish songs with metal style makes a language often associated with traditional Ashkenazic society relevant to the twenty-first century.

This article is an account of Huniberside Leisure Services' computerised approach to the problem of locating songs in score collections.

The New Zealand Digital Library project aims to develop the underlying technology for digital libraries and make it available for others to use to create their own collections. We have built a large number of demonstration collections. Because our policy is to avoid manual processing of material, full‐text indexing and — to a lesser degree — automatically created browsing structures provide the primary point of access to the material. As well as conventional textual collections, we are experimenting with collections of musical and audio material. This article describes the library structure and present and planned collections, and summarises our experiences in the project.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the performance of Zhuang shamanic narrative songs at three festivals to explore how and why a narrative song genre that originated with Zhuang shamans is separated from shamanic ritual contexts and re-contextualized at festivals under the cultural policies instigated by the People’s Republic of China in the post-socialist era.

The research is based on a review of publications on Zhuang performance art and fieldwork data collected in southwestern Guangxi, China.

The de-construction of Zhuang shamanic narrative song melodies dates back to the late nineteenth century, when southwestern Guangxi literati used the melodies to compose popular songs. By the 1950s, the religious elements of these narrative songs had already been obfuscated, leading Chinese scholars to select them as representative of Zhuang performance arts. Since the enactment of China’s Intangible Culture Heritage (ICH) Law in the early twenty-first century, local Zhuang elites have re-constructed and re-introduced shamanic elements to narrative songs as they are performed at festivals as a means to further highlight the ethnic characteristics of the Zhuang people.

The paper provides detailed documentation of three cases of the restoration of shamanic elements to narrative songs sung by the Zhuang people. However, the research is limited to one community, inviting comparison with other cases, both inside and outside China, of how ICH policies impact grass-roots cultural practices.

The purpose of this monograph is to examine the main elements of the Copyright Designs & Patents Act 1988 which received the Royal Assent on the 15th November 1988. The Act provided for a major overhaul of the law on copyright and on registered designs, as well as certain adjustments to patent and trademark law and two major new regimes on performers' rights and design rights. While this is a major domestic reform the law is unlikely to remain unaltered for long because of the move towards a single market within the E.E.C. by 1992. This will lead to the introduction of harmonised regimes on the various elements of intellectual property law such as copyright and industrial design which will no doubt require some readjustment to U.K. domestic law. Recently the E.E.C. Commission published a Green Paper on “Copyright and the Challenge of Technology” which suggests solutions to some questions such as the vexed problem of illegal home taping which are different to those adopted by the U.K. in the new Act. [On 21/12/88 a draft directive on Copyright & Computer Software which proposes a harmonised regime for the protection of computer programs and related matters was published]. It also has to be borne in mind that while Article 222 of the Treaty of Rome states that the treaty does not affect the existence of national intellectual property right regimes the “exercise” of these national rights may be found to infringe the provisions of the Treaty on free movement of goods (Arts. 30–36) or on competition law (Arts. 85–86).

The purpose of this paper is to explore aural representation of the countryside and English rurality through the contemporary cultural product of folk song.

A textual analysis was undertaken of the sleeve notes and lyrics of Steve Knightley, songwriter and founder member of the folk/roots band Show of Hands.

The concept of the rural idyll is thoroughly debunked in the majority of these lyrics. Many songs make specific reference to place, and these, in the main, focus on the historical and contemporary hardships of living in rural England, in many cases also making explicit reference to the historical or contemporary social issues deemed by the lyricist to be at the root of the problems faced by people living in English rural communities.

This paper analyses data obtained in lyrics of only one songwriter within only one music genre, but the artist is one of the most respected within the contemporary folk genre, and Show of Hands have won a number of prestigious nationally recognised folk awards.

The extant literature contains little concerning aural representations of place identities through song. The contribution this paper makes is therefore in presenting a conceptual framework that shows how folk song, as a contemporary cultural product contributes to the construction and communication of rural place identities.

AT a conference held in London in March of this year, under the chairmanship of Mr. Frank Howes, President of the Royal Musical Association, it was proposed that an Institute of Recorded Sound should be set up, which would have as its main function the preservation of sound recordings of all types for posterity and for the current use of students.