Editorial

Citation

Baker, D.M. (2015), "Editorial", New Library World, Vol. 116 No. 9/10. https://doi.org/10.1108/NLW-05-2015-0039

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: New Library World, Volume 116, Issue 9/10

New Library World aims to be a truly international journal, and this double issue provides much evidence to suggest that we are meeting that objective with articles from around the globe, albeit in this instance with an emphasis on Africa and India.

Keren Dali opens with “an honest look” at reading scholarship, “one of the most exciting academic fields, regrettably neglected by LIS [Library and Information Science]”. “Paradigmatic conflicts, the influence of the corporate university, and low awareness of the potential of reading research” have all contributed to the “gradual extinction” of reading research in Library and Information Science (LIS) departments.

Because in recent years LIS has been “dominated” by the “information science paradigm”, reading research has been largely overlooked. Dali argues that “library science”, when treated as “an autonomous discipline rather than an appendix of information science”, provides a much better context in which the study of reading can be carried out.

Dali rightly goes on to reject the notion that reading scholarship is “old fashioned” and “traditional”, arguing powerfully that it is instead “one of the most potent areas of academic inquiry, to which LIS scholars are perfectly positioned to make a unique contribution” and especially through “interdisciplinary connections, community partnerships, and the enrichment of LIS education and professional practices”.

Bonnici and others report on a study looking at the state of library services to people with disabilities in the USA since 2008. This study is the first comparative study of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS/BPH). A comprehensive survey encompassing areas such as clientele, services, technologies, career opportunities, leadership, LIS education and librarian demographics was undertaken. A number of major challenges for the future were identified. It is hoped that similar surveys can be carried out in other countries as a way of increasing research and development in this important area. Certainly, it looks as though the results of the present research will assist librarians to plan information services for disabled patrons and help LIS educators to prepare future members of library staffs to offer high-quality services in this important area of activity.

State and others consider the subject cataloguing of local publications and subject access to local publications with special reference to Africa through the use of interviews, document reviews and observations. Worryingly, the authors comment that “adherence to cataloguing standards takes precedence over subject access; rarely is a user [the] focus of choice of the subject term in the process of cataloguing”. The present study offers a way of “streamlining the process of subject cataloguing [and therefore] enhancing access to these uniquely held resources”. The work should also be of interest to those teaching and studying this important and often overlooked area.

Mills offers a new approach to job performance evaluation. Interest in outcomes assessment and evaluation is increasing in the educational institutions where academic librarians work. The development of a Librarianship Profile offers an opportunity to mirror the professional teaching portfolio often found in universities. Such an approach could be used “for the purposes of permanent status evaluation and rank promotion” as well as serving as a basis for collecting documentation and highlighting excellence in job performance.

Just as there is an increasing emphasis in LIS on the management and enhancement of an individual’s performance, so too is there an ever greater scrutiny of the effectiveness of library services. Jeevan focuses on providing a holistic approach to performance evaluation of university libraries in India, a country with one of the greatest concentrations of academic libraries in the world, and yet with only limited tools available to manage and monitor the sector’s efficiency, efficacy and future development. The performance framework adopted here concentrates on parameters, players and procedures to offer a way of providing an integrated and comprehensive overview of university libraries.

Shrivastava and Mahajan’s study looks at the emerging field of altmetrics, aiming “to investigate the relationship between the altmetric indicators from ResearchGate and the bibliometric indicators from the Scopus database” as well as seeking “to examine relationship amongst the ResearchGate altmetric indicators themselves”. The authors suggest that tools such as ResearchGate have the potential to be used as “an alternative to traditional sources of bibliometric indicators, especially with reference to a rapidly developing country such as India”.

Ukachi reports on an unusual study carried out to establish the situation with regard to information literacy among different types of artisan in Lagos, Nigeria. Carrying out the research presented a number of challenges, and not least the need to carry out interviews, given the writing skills of the participants in the survey. Not surprisingly, mobile technology has proved a much more effective medium than more traditional library provision. Yet there is little doubt that where information literacy skills have been enhanced among this group of workers, so too has their quality of life. There is an obvious message here for public library services and the governments that fund them, and not just in Africa.

Tella’s study follows on neatly from Ukachi’s in that it looks at the relative merits of electronic and paper-based data collections methods, also in Nigeria. Given the country’s present state of development, it is perhaps not surprising that electronic data collection methods have yet to become the norm as they have in the western world. Clearly this situation is likely to change, as more people living and working in Africa have the requisite skills as well as the pervasive connectivity required to make paper-based methods obsolete. The study rightly points out the cost savings to be had over time by use of electronic methods in the future, especially in an African context.

Makori and others assess practical aspects of the implementation of institutional repositories in Africa in general and the University of Nairobi in particular, providing guidelines to other practitioners on the basis of lessons learned from their experiences. As in many academic institutions in the western world, the authors found that “the institutional repository has not been well integrated into mainstream information services” and that “there is a lack of awareness about the use of the institutional repository as an information resource”. It seems clear from the present paper that there is a need to integrate a wide range of formats and content into the institutional repository and to market the results much more aggressively than before if the service is to be a truly valuable resource.

Bruce Massis concludes this double issue with a telling and timely commentary on librarianship’s “flexibility in the face of change”, the “hallmark of an exceptional service-minded organization”. The author argues convincingly that with an ever-expanding and diversifying, libraries “must always be forward – thinking and forward – seeking in their ability to satisfy”. By means of a process of “continual evolution”, it should be possible to envisage a situation where the “golden age” of the library is in the future rather than the past. Indeed, exemplars of present and future best practice and provision already exist, not least as described in the pages of this journal.

David Michael Baker

University of St Mark & St John, Plymouth, UK