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This chapter examines the impact and influence of the visual and performing arts in sustaining thriving communities and highlights the essential role of libraries in providing access to arts and cultural programming and services. Creative and artistic intervention has become the imperative of our time. Creativity is required not only in design studios and workshops, but in all areas of work and life, both professional and personal. Places of artistic and cultural production are strongly correlated with strong local economies and sustainable communities. Libraries are public spaces that promote and maintain community, not only civic institutions. As such, the library plays a key role as incubator for the arts. Libraries advocate freedom: of ideas, communication, and information. Arts programming in libraries provides an avenue for people to communicate ideas and feelings through visual, auditory, or kinesthetic forms. But more than that, libraries are also about education, safe and welcoming spaces, community, and entertainment. Libraries support and promote the value of multiple perspectives and voices. Libraries can shape patronage of the arts and engage future generations by addressing social diversity and inciting inclusive participation in the arts. Many libraries are participating in the creation of new forms of understanding through arts programming, services, and resources. In an age where many of society’s most important challenges are related to our relationship with information, it is vitally important to include visual and performing arts professionals in the intersection between artistic practice and critical engagement with information.

This paper aims to study the information needs and online information-seeking behaviors on mobile platforms of performing arts students at a college level.

Survey instruments were used to collect data from performing arts students at the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts (HKAPA), a metropolitan’s major performing arts tertiary institution. Data collected were analyzed through descriptive statistics and other statistical methods, and the music-related students were compared with the production-related students.

The result reveals that performing arts students all owned their mobile devices and often used mobile apps for non-academic purposes, but they did not often use mobile library services or read online academic contents with their mobile devices. The participants considered inadequate signal coverage, slow loading time, difficulty in reading on a mobile device and the lack of specialized mobile apps as more significant barriers affecting their usage. There are some significant differences between the music-related and production-related student groups in that music-related students watched lectures on the library websites and used electronic music scores more often than the production-related students.

This study contributes to the input for enhancements and policies to future mobile services and facilities of performing art libraries.

There have been scant studies on the mobile learning needs of performing arts students, especially in Asia.

The humanities are facing considerable difficulties and pressures in Australian universities, as staff numbers fall and research funds shrink. Despite this, various innovative projects, aimed at creating electronic versions of texts and other cultural materials, are currently in progress. A range of different cultural institutions is involved, though the university and state libraries are the most active participants. Funding for such projects is difficult to come by, and the future looks somewhat uncertain. If a more coordinated and coherent approach to building digital libraries is to succeed in Australia, researchers and cultural institutions will need to work together to establish the appropriate financial and organizational frameworks.

This paper seeks to explore how and via what tools music students are identifying, locating, and accessing music materials – specifically scores and recordings – for use in their music studies. It also aims to examine similarities and differences in the information seeking behavior of students in various music sub‐disciplines and students at different points in their academic tenure.

The study employed survey and focus groups methodologies.

It was found that students use myriad library and non‐library tools to discover and access scores and recordings. It identified the frequency and specificity with which students seek scores and recordings. There are more similarities between performers and music educators than musicologists or other areas, and graduate and upperclass students have different behaviors than underclass students, who are more likely to use library resources. This study also identified some of the reasons students become frustrated in searching for music materials and from where they seek help.

The response rate to this survey was only 11 percent and surveys are not the best indicator of actual behavior. While the use of focus groups did offset this to a degree, a more widespread survey and user studies would be merited to understand any wider patters of music student behaviors.

With the findings from this study libraries serving music students can tailor their instruction and marketing efforts. They can also focus their collections and resources appropriately for the various types of patrons served by their library.

Little previous research has been done on the general information seeking behaviors of music students. Other work has focused on music faculty, specific sub‐disciplines in music, or on issues specific to finding music in library catalogs.

Decentralization is a widespread and international phenomenon in public administration. Despite the interest of public management scholars, an in-depth analysis of the interrelationship between two of its forms – deconcentration and devolution – and its impact on policy and management capacities at the local level is seldom investigated.

This article addresses this gap by examining the implementation of deconcentration and devolution processes in France and Italy in the cultural field, combining the analysis of national reform processes with in-depth analyses of two regional cases. The research is the result of document analysis, participatory observation and semi-structured interviews.

The article reconstructs the impacts of devolution and deconcentration processes on the emergence of policy and management capacity in two regions (Rhone-Alpes and Piedmont) in the cultural sector. The article shows that decentralization in the cultural sector in France and Italy is the result of different combinations of devolution and deconcentration processes, that the two processes mutually affect their effectiveness, and that this effectiveness is deeply linked to the previous policy and management capacity of the central state in a specific field/country.

The article investigates decentralization as a result of the combination of deconcentration and devolution in comparative terms and in a specific sector of implementation, highlighting the usefulness of this approach also for other sectors/countries

The study aims to understand how practicing organizational performance evaluation (OPE) is related to the performance paradox (tensions between creative freedom and survival challenges) in “evaluation-hesitant” cultural and creative industries (CCI) organizations.

Mixed methods research, consisting of moderation analyses and unstructured expert interviews.

A conceptual model is developed to explain how creative freedom and survival challenges affect OPE in “evaluation-hesitant” CCI organizations.

The authors bring a new understanding to the factors that contribute to evaluation-hesitance in CCI. The paper contributes to discussing both the theory of paradox and flow theory in explaining the relations between OPE, creative freedom and survival challenges.