Editorial

Citation

Ashcroft, L. (2012), "Editorial", New Library World, Vol. 113 No. 1/2. https://doi.org/10.1108/nlw.2012.072113aaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: New Library World, Volume 113, Issue 1/2

“Word-of-mouth marketing” is an umbrella term that covers a range of practices. However, it is different from traditional communication channels in that it is immediate, open and personal. It is targeted to start and support conversations between the library and its customers. Libraries can encourage the spread of word of mouth by educating customers about the services the library offers, providing an experience that people want to share with their friends and giving customers ways to share information. In her paper, Bailey discusses another mode of education for library customers – informal screencasting – which is capturing your actions on a computer screen with the goal of showing others how to accomplish tasks on a website or in a given software environment. She provides the results of a survey assessing academic library customers’ attitudes towards informal screencasting as an instructional tool, which had positive responses.

A new e-book platform has been announced by Cambridge University Press that will integrate digital content from other academic publishers. “A key concept of University Publishing Online is to preserve the individual identity of each of its publishing partners, as every academic press makes a unique contribution to the world of scholarship through its own particular process of selecting, editing and presenting material” (see http://ebooks.cambridge.org). Further publishers will be added as the platform develops. Dewan’s paper considers current and future academic e-book trends. She points out that academic librarians planning for the future need to be knowledgeable about the outlook for print in both the short and long term. She suggests ideas for response to collection changes in light of the trends considered.

The Primo discovery platform is being made available in collaboration between Ex Libris, its developer, and Infor Library and Information Solutions through Infor customer libraries. Primo is a cloud-based service encompassing hundreds of millions of scholarly resources, and it will be available to Infor customers as an option within Infor’s Iguana platform. The paper from Alemu et al. considers providing users with satisfying experiences by reviewing works in relation to current metadata creation, utilisation and interoperability approaches focusing on how a social constructivist philosophical perspective can be employed to underpin metadata decisions in digital libraries.

A partnership between the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea and Bloomsbury Publishing PLC will see librarians working with the publisher to design a series of events to run throughout the year. The first event focused on schools and encouraged children to visit libraries more often. Early in 2012 Bloomsbury will supply authors for a London-wide spring festival. The creation of library based events aims to bring books alive in the community. Anderson’s paper provides a case study about planning a major event which markets library resources to user constituencies. It focuses on an annual welcome event to introduce new students at the University at Albany to library services and facilities, highlighting the importance of detailed planning and extensive partnerships on campus.

A series of grants from the South Western Regional Library Service (SWRLS) in the UK have been made to further collaborative working and resource sharing. SWRLS is a charitable organisation and a survey of the membership identified that offering small grants would help to encourage more shared project working and partnership across the sectors. vanDuinkerken, in her paper, reports on the challenges and lessons learned when trying to implement a “Resource in Common”. She discusses the experiences of the Texas A&M University Libraries processing team when trying to implement a high density storage unit model between Texas A&M University Library and the University of Texas-Austin Libraries.

The online edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has, for many, become the dominant and preferred form for reference, research and reading. New features aim to make connections easier to spot and to provide new lines of study. As well as biographies, now included is a series of “reference lists” and “reference groups” that offer thousands of new routes into the past and are capable of charting connections between people who are otherwise covered as single entries in the main dictionary. In her paper, Soules compares biographical content for literary authors writing in English in a number of sources. From the sample examined, she found that core content was similar across the sources, but each source provided something unique and revealed strengths and weaknesses.

Linda Ashcroft