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This chapter adopts a sociological perspective to examine the phenomenon of destination branding. Invoking the social exchange theory as the foundation and its complex exchange system as its framework, the chapter elaborates the uniqueness of rural destination as a social structure rather than a market or organizational entity. A branding model for rural destinations is proposed and illustrated through a case study. The model advocates a community-based approach to image research as a platform on which the branding process takes place. The chapter reports the comparative findings on the image as projected by a destination marketing organization, perceived by current and potential tourists, and desired by local residents. By highlighting the role of host community's participation in tourism branding, the study informs its definition as a continuing process to create affective experiences through building a unique identity and sustaining a consistent image that emotionally bond with residents and resonate with tourists.

RLG is a not-for-profit international alliance of about 160 members, including universities and colleges, national and public research libraries, archives, historical societies, museums, and independent research collections devoted to improving access to information that supports research and learning. Founded in 1974 as the Research Libraries Group by four visionary library directors from Columbia, Harvard and Yale universities and the New York Public Library, the consortium formed to allow research institutions to tackle tough challenges via collaborative action. Key issues were managing the transition from locally self-sufficient and independently comprehensive collections to a system of interdependencies that would preserve and enhance the capacity for research in all fields of knowledge and improving the ability to locate and retrieve relevant research resources (RLG, 1986). At its inception, four activity areas were identified for collaborative action: cooperative bibliographic control and access; effective mechanisms for sharing information and resources among member institutions; expanded and coordinated collection development efforts; and preservation of the collections, either in the original or surrogate format.

This study compares filmic and televisual representations of fictional black presidents to white Americans’ reactions to the advent of the United States’s first African American president. My main goal is to determine if there is convergence between these mediated representations and whites’ real-world representations of Barack Obama. I then weigh the evidence for media pundits’ speculations that Obama owes his election to positive portrayals of these fictional heads of state.

The film and television analyses examine each black president’s social network, personality, character traits, preparation for office, and leadership ability. I then compare the ideological messages conveyed through these portrayals to the messages implicated in white Americans’ discursive and pictorial representations of Barack Obama.

Both filmic and televisual narratives and public discourses and images construct and portray black presidents with stereotypical character traits and abilities. These representations are overwhelmingly negative and provide no support for the argument that there is a cause–effect relationship between filmic and televisual black presidents and Obama’s election victory.

Neither reel nor real-life black presidents can elude the representational quagmire that distorts African Americans’ abilities and diversity. Discourses, iconography, narratives, and other representations that define black presidents through negative tropes imply that blacks are incapable of effective leadership. These hegemonic representations seek to delegitimize black presidents and symbolically return them to subordinate statuses.

A case study is presented in this chapter about a successful cross-campus collaboration between the School of Art and the Department of Classics at the University of Georgia (UGA) in the United States to build one image database with grant funding for a period of two academic years. Although the Humanities Digital Media Archive project was not free from complications, the outcome of the project suggests that these types of collaborative projects are valuable to librarians and to the university at large. An overview of the strengths and weaknesses of the project are described and can provide guidance to readers undertaking these types of collaborative projects. A discussion about funding opportunities in an era of reduced resources may encourage the reader to think in new and creative ways to solve the issue of lack of funding for such major projects. While many librarians and units on campus discuss potential collaborative projects, this case study provides a description of the issues and complications surrounding such projects as well as creative new ways of maximizing available resources and completing a successful and well-received project.

This chapter reviews published studies of the use of pictorial information. Examining image user studies surfaces several research questions often addressed by this body of work, as well as some frequently encountered problems. These questions and problems organize this survey of the literature. Image user studies were included in two valuable reviews of digital image research and development, published by Christie Stephenson and Corinne Jörgensen in 1999 (Jörgensen, 1999; Stephenson, 1999). This overview considers research since that time, focusing on assessment that was not targeted at a single system or service. While attempting to incorporate some interesting research from the information and educational technology communities, this discussion of image delivery as an aspect of digital library development limits coverage of those important literatures.

Based on the assumption that the identity and self-understanding of an academic discipline determines how it conceptualizes different domains of social reality, including how it imports and/or exports concepts from or to other disciplines, this chapter presents some of the findings of a major ongoing comparative and cross-disciplinary study of how five key concepts within the combined fields of crisis management and reputation management are applied in three different disciplinary contexts. In this chapter, however, the focus is on just one of these concepts: the concept of reputation.

This chapter addresses issues of what should be done and when. Structuring of the project task into a number of activities is key to planning a course of action for a project. It involves combining two dimensions: when (the time) and what (relevant subject areas or work paths). Several examples will illustrate the issue.

The five-by-five model will be used to identify five parallel processes of a project: (1) task-oriented processes concerned with development of a solution, (2) organisational change processes focusing on understanding and accepting the change, (3) application and operational processes concerned with application and use of the project’s results, (4) environmental processes focusing on the interplay between the project and its environment including stakeholders, and (5) management processes dealing with activities in the middle box of the five-by-five model.

A number of models of the project’s course of action will be presented and discussed, e.g., a waterfall model, a parallel stream model based on the four perspectives introduced in Chapter 1, the course of actions as decisions and as a change process. Finally, we shall discuss Agile and Lean project management.