Acknowledgements - Introduction - Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Conclusion - Notes - Works Cited - Index

Closing Sysco presents a history of deindustrialization and working-class resistance in the Cape Breton steel industry between 1945 and 2001. The Sydney Steel Works is at the heart of this story, having existed in tandem with Cape Breton's larger coal operations since the early twentieth century. The book explores the multifaceted nature of deindustrialization; the internal politics of the steelworkers' union; the successful efforts to nationalize the mill in 1967; the years in transition under public ownership; and the confrontations over health, safety, and environmental degradation in the 1990s and 2000s. Closing Sysco moves beyond the moment of closure to trace the cultural, historical, and political ramifications of deindustrialization that continue to play out in post-industrial Cape Breton Island. A significant intervention into the international literature on deindustrialization, this study pushes scholarship beyond the bounds of political economy and cultural change to begin tackling issues of bodily health, environment, and historical memory in post-industrial places. The experiences of the men and women who were displaced by the decline and closure of Sydney Steel are central to this book. Featuring interviews with former steelworkers, office employees, managers, politicians, and community activists, these one-on-one conversations reveal both the human cost of industrial closure and the lingering after-effects of deindustrialization.

Doves is Lachlan Mackinnon's most candid and affecting volume of poems to date, and follows on from Small Hours, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry in 2010. Formally dexterous and inventive, these inclusive, approachable poems welcome all-comers in their broad-minded address: refugees, reality television, detective shows, number-theory, Shakespeare's brothers, ecology, a marriage.

Wherever it turns, the poetry remains courageously sociable and moral, ever concerned with honouring lives and good deeds, and asking what can be saved from the ruins of what is lost by individuals, cultures and civilisations. But for all its outward gaze, its cares speak privately too - of crises in personal action and belief, of friends and intimacies disturbed and renewed - and, underpinning it all, an urging to account for our behaviour and 'to start to answer / to ourselves for what we have made of life.'

Doves is an uplifting account of recovery that makes no stranger of despair. But with each moment of despondency comes a tough-minded - even humorous - response that tempers grief, and bolsters our equipment for living, and in so doing extends a timeless ring around the heart of this thoughtful, inspiriting and memorable book.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 27th British National Conference on Databases, BNCOD 27, held in Dundee, UK, in June 2010. The 10 revised full papers and 6 short papers, presented together with 3 invited papers, 1 best paper of the associated event on Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases (TLAD), and 2 PhD forum best papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 42 submissions. Special focus of the conference has been "Data Security and Security Data" and so the papers cover a wide range of topics such as data security, privacy and trust, security data, data integration and interoperability, data management for ubiquitous and mobile computing, data mining and information extraction, data modelling and architectures, data provenance, dataspaces, data streaming, databases and the grid, distributed information systems, electronic commerce, enterprise systems, heterogeneous databases, industrial applications, infrastructures and systems, intermittently connected data, file access methods and index structures, managing legacy data, new applications and processes, parallel and distributed databases, peer-to-peer data management, performance modelling of ubiquitous data use, personal data management, query and manipulation languages, query processing and optimisation, scientific applications, semantic Web and ontologies, semi-structured data, metadata and xml, user interfaces and data visualisation, Web data management and deep Web, Web services, and workflow support systems.

This year marked the coming of age of the British National Conference on Databases with its 21st conference held at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, in July 2004. To mark the occasion the general theme of the conference was "When Data Is Key," reflecting not only the traditional key awarded on a 21st birthday, but also the ev- growing importance of electronic data management in every aspect of our modern lives. The conference was run as part of DAMMS (Data Analysis, Manipulation, Management and Storage) Week, which included a number of co-located and complementary conferences and workshops, including the 2nd Workshop on Teaching, Learning and Assessment in Databases (TLAD2), the BNCOD BioInformatics Workshop, and the 1st International Conference on the Future of Consumer Insight Developments in Retail Banking. The aim of this co-location was to develop synergies between the teaching, research and commercial communities involved in all aspects of database activities, and to use BNCOD as a focus for future synergies and developments within these communities. Although this is entitled the British National Conference on Databases, BNCOD has always had an international focus, and this year more than most, with the majority of the papers submitted and accepted coming from outwith the UK.

Many of the poems in The Missing Months occupy the strange hiatus afforded by lockdown. They look forward as well as back, toying with possible futures, enthused by utopian dreams or fearing cultural and bodily entropy. They celebrate and mourn the lives of friends and relatives, captivated by carefully tended images from the past. Lockdown's 'missing months' in the world of a four-year-old granddaughter are laid down and remembered for her. Familiar objects - a park bench, stones, grass, stars, windows - are reanimated. This poetry of imaginative journeying 'stretches/Banks on a slope of air and turns' like the heron it watches. Between the crackle of radio signals and rain, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam and the American singer Miranda Lambert, here is a poet in search of points of reference, the 'bright fresh leaves' of sunlight among the ruins.

Closing Sysco presents a history of deindustrialization and working-class resistance in the Cape Breton steel industry between 1945 and 2001. The Sydney Steel Works is at the heart of this story, having existed in tandem with Cape Breton's larger coal operations since the early twentieth century. The book explores the multifaceted nature of deindustrialization; the internal politics of the steelworkers' union; the successful efforts to nationalize the mill in 1967; the years in transition under public ownership; and the confrontations over health, safety, and environmental degradation in the 1990s and 2000s. Closing Sysco moves beyond the moment of closure to trace the cultural, historical, and political ramifications of deindustrialization that continue to play out in post-industrial Cape Breton Island. A significant intervention into the international literature on deindustrialization, this study pushes scholarship beyond the bounds of political economy and cultural change to begin tackling issues of bodily health, environment, and historical memory in post-industrial places. The experiences of the men and women who were displaced by the decline and closure of Sydney Steel are central to this book. Featuring interviews with former steelworkers, office employees, managers, politicians, and community activists, these one-on-one conversations reveal both the human cost of industrial closure and the lingering after-effects of deindustrialization.

Lachlan MacKinnon's fourth collection opens with a gathering of lyrics and descriptive poems: observing rites of passage (elegies, wedding poems), offering nuanced accounts of places and their patchwork afterlives (the Midlands, a Suffolk sketchbook), or meditations on historical figures introspectively at odds with their time (King Canute, Edward Thomas). This preoccupation with contingency - personal and historical - opens onto The Book of Emma: a long poem of fifty-four sections, written mostly in prose, which address a lost friend and contemporary in terms which seem laconically factual, but which draw their power from archaic conventions (Egyptian, Celtic) of talking to the dead.