Editorial

Citation

Brown, M. and Gelfand, J. (2007), "Editorial", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 24 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2007.23924aaa.001

Editorial

Issues in technology become no less complicated with each new year. The role of librarians and libraries continue to be discussed as a more digital presence emerges in our information sectors and the information economy continues to expand, due to an entrepreneurial spirit with many new products and ways of doing things. We are advancing our educational systems worldwide at all levels and the dependency on the laptop as a student resource extends to earlier study and younger students.

In this issue, we pose some important issues and also try to push the envelope on some new content areas. First off, we have some significant conference reports that are terrific reading opportunities. The 2006 Educause conference was reported to be among the best and we have a detailed conference report of that meeting jointly written by Colby Riggs and Barbara Cohen, our veteran correspondents who have been contributing this report for many years. Penny O'Connor returns to write this time about the ASIST conference and the science pre-conference or Daser Summit where a lot of technology ideas were shared. The 26th annual Charleston Conference had some interesting news and our sister editor of Collection Building, Kay Cassell contributed to that report. The Eighth International Conference on Grey Literature took place also in the American South this year, in New Orleans. Having the chance to return nearly six months after my last visit during the 2006 ALA meeting in June it was evident that much renovation and rebuilding has taken place. Our new co-editor, Mitchell Brown writes about the second ARL conference on Scholarly Communication held at Duke University. The purpose of this meeting is to train institutional leaders to shepherd campus discussions about issues relating to scholarly communication which is clearly high priority on academic research library campuses this year in North America, Europe and Asia. This model about creating methods and ways to address the many complex issues and depart from the original emphasis of the economics of scholarly communication is novel and intense as it mobilizes academic administrators, faculty, librarians and information providers to huddle into dialogues and task themselves for new actions.

This issue also debuts a new co-editor and it is with great pleasure that I introduce you to another of my colleagues at the University of California, Irvine Libraries, Mitchell Brown. We will not steal any thunder here but just encourage you to meet him by reading the interview found in this issue. He will clearly be having a presence taking on new columns and exposing some issues that should generate lots of ideas and discussion. He brought us Aimee Fifarek, who also debuts in this column about technology tips in risk adverse settings. She will continue to address issues of interest to public libraries.

We want to explore new things with our readers – however what do you want to read about? We have lots of new content planned but also need contributors so please consider this an invitation to participate and take pen to paper or use that new pda, laptop or your familiar desktop model to mix the left and right brain hemispheres for some creative output. We hope that you are exploring Web 2.0, maybe have bought an island or are lurking on Second Life. If so, what are you doing there? We would very much like to learn from your experiences and hope that you will share. e-Books also have lots of new things to brag about and we will highlight those in coming issues.

Our publishers, Emerald are celebrating 40 years of scholarly publishing and we will be having future issues devoted to a more celebratory stance as we report on the ALA Midwinter meeting next month.

Again, this issue was late and we apologize, but we look forward to getting back on track.

Mitchell Brown(mcbrown@uci.edu)Julia Gelfand(jgelfand@uci.edu)Co-editors