AIDAinformazioni 3-4/2007

http://www.aidainformazioni.it

AIDAinformazioni

trimestrale - ISSN 11210095, eISSN 15942201
n. 3-4, anno 25, luglio-dicembre 2007

Recensioni
“Journal of Web Librarianship”. The Hawthorne Information Press. ISSN: 19322909, eISSN: 19322917.

Mary Joan Crowley
"La Sapienza" Università degli studi, Biblioteca del Dipartimento di Ingegneria strutturale e geotecnica, Roma

The rapidly evolving digital world has changed culture, society, economics, the political and the legal systems and librarianship, too, in that libraries reflect the human record and so much of that record is now distributed in a network form. The newly launched "Journal of Web Librarianship" strives to provide a reliable resource for librarians and help provide insight into what "web librarianship" might mean and how best to achieve their many roles and responsibilities within a virtual world.

The "online library" is a difficult concept to convey, as the new editor, Jody Condit Fagan, points out in her first editorial. Jody works as a Digital Services Librarian at James Madison University and has published widely on topics related to digital reference, usability, and Web interface design. She herself attended the local public library right from her early years, being left there by her mother while she went off to try and solve problems with the state authorities over her choice to home school her children. Ironically, it was the librarian who then reported her for truancy and thus Jody was enroped in the public school system. It was here in the library that Jody first started investigating the available computers and playing with a boolean logic educational game that she feels was what generated her current career choice.

In the podcast on the journal's homepage Jody states that one of the underpinning reasons leading her to creating the Journal of Web Librarianship was the need to define the library in the 21st century. «The library» she says, «is a discrete space, as large or larger than the physical library». It is hard for people to see in the virtual world and one of the aims of this journal is to provide a virtual vision of innovative and practical uses of the Web in every aspect of service and administration where the library intersects the Web as a spatial destination.

Joe Janes, an Information Professional and Associate Dean for academics at the University of Washington Eye School, in another pod broadcast, welcomes the new journal covering as it does for the first time the concept of librarianship and the Web. As he points out the Web is not just another technology that comes and goes, but rather it's going to be around for quite a while. «You can't be a librarian and not be on the Web, at least not a good librarian», he maintains and the JWL makes a worthwhile contribution in helping professionals to think newly and differently, to meet new challenges and describe the tools needed to meet these challenges.

The Journal of Web Librarianship is an international, peer-reviewed journal published quarterly by Haworth, Inc., that has recently been taken over by Taylor and Francis. Information about subscriptions may be found on the Haworth web site. A single print subscription guarantees site-wide access to the electronic edition.

With this journal the developing community of Web librarians can receive the latest reviews of books and other resources relevant to librarians and their duties, the latest research results, regular updates about the state of the research agenda in Web librarianship, library Web projects in other countries, and the newest developments in the cataloguing and classification of Web information.

The aim of the JWL Board, all highly qualified information professionals with different types of expertise to offer and keenly interested in Web librarianship, is to provide a journal with cutting edge topics, that are published quickly. To overcome any publication's lag, online content is also made available on the homepage. This is very much in keeping with other journals such as Nature and Science and their experimentation with new technologies and Web 2.0 tools to get some of their research out more quickly. This and the most current news and information about the journal can be found on the editorial blog, podcasts and RSS feeds.

Examples of topics covered in the first two issues of the Journal of Web Librarianship include: web page design, usability testing of library or library-related sites, cataloguing or classification of Web information, international issues in web librarianship, web-related library projects in countries beyond the United States, scholars' use of the web, information architecture, library departmental web pages, RSS feeds, podcasting, library services via the web, search engines, using wikis for professional knowledge sharing , a case study measuring the success of the academic library website using banner advertisements and web conversion rates, a helpful tutorial on how to integrate the library catalogue into Mozilla's Firefox search bar, and much more... What is offered is a good mix of reviews, in depth research and more practical how-to tutorials.

The Review Section, edited by Phillip M. Edwards who currently teaches at the Information School, University of Washington, where he is a doctoral candidate., is designed to present readers with brief evaluations of published materials on emerging technologies and topics related to professional practice. A visit to the Review Section web page for more information about books received, or reviews in progress, including information regarding the issues they are to appear in, is a mine of information and a means of keeping updated about forthcoming publications in the field. Material reviewed in the "Journal of Web Librarianship" are listed on Amazon and can be ordered through them.

Forthcoming Issue 3 (Fall 2007) and Issue 4 (Winter 2007) follow in a similar vein covering a range of topics, including What Libraries are Doing with the Social Web, Accessing Scotland's Culture and History Online, Library Webmasters in Medium-Sized Academic Libraries, Using Electronic Course Reserves to Promote Information Literacy of First-Year Students in a University Writing Program, Testing the Federated Searching Waters, A Usability Study of MetaLib, A Student-Focused Usability Study of the Western Michigan University Libraries Home Page, Supporting Library Research with LibX and Zotero: Two Open Source Firefox Extensions, What a User Wants: Redesigning a Library's Web Site Based on a Card-Sort Analysis, Promoting the Development of Online Learning Communities for Library Professional Organizations, Adventures in Online Mentoring, The New Members' Roundtable Career Mentoring Program, Connecting Social Technologies with Information Literacy, Twenty Steps to Marketing Your Library Online and much more...

Both scholarly research articles and practical communications published in the JWL are peer-reviewed. They aim for the review process to take no more than four to six weeks. Joe Janes is of the opinion that being peer-reviewed is important and guarantees the quality of the research results published. The "Journal of Web Librarianship" strives to strike a balance between original, scholarly research, and practical communications about relevant topics in web librarianship. Recently the journal launched a call for papers on Library Websites: Evaluation and Usability Studies. This special issue of "The Journal of Web Librarianship" seeks papers reporting empirical studies evaluating library Websites in any type of library environment. The methodologies used are not limited and may include quantitative or qualitative techniques, case studies, longitudinal studies, experiments, focus groups, surveys, questionnaires, interviews, or other research designs. Papers may include the evaluation and testing of new user-centred measures.

The "Journal of Web Librarianship" is a vital journal perfect for Web librarians, digital services librarians, electronic resources librarians, and researchers who see an application for Web librarianship to their own work. It also provides a publishing forum for high-quality, professionally written articles about web librarianship.

On another note, however, while librarians are aware that value-adding activities such as peer-review, copyediting, and printing are crucial to scholarly communication and are costly, it could have been hoped that a start-up journal of this nature would have opted for a different publishing model. Moreover, the publisher requests that authors agree to transfer copyright of their work to Hawthorne Press, although it does permit that they retain preprint distribution rights and the contributor may update the preprint with the final version of the article after review and revision by the editor.

At a time when librarians are playing a greater role in distributing the scholarship of their own institution, when many of them have begun to advocate faculty retention copyright and criticise the economic power and enormous profits that ownership retainment guarantees the publishers, the decision to publish such an innovative journal written for and by librarians, most of them with posts within the academic community, with a commercial publisher is, perhaps, not an enlightened choice.