Editor's page

Citation

Raitt, D. (2007), "Editor's page", The Electronic Library, Vol. 25 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/el.2007.26325aaa.002

Editor's page

It has been truly gratifying to see the enormous interest shown in the first issue of TEL and I sincerely hope this can be sustained.

A comment was made at the 6th International Online Information Meeting in London last December, by someone from a British university, to the effect that “who’s interested in reading about library automation in Norway?” This attitude is precisely what this journal hopes to break down. This is an international journal. And an international journal must cover the international scene. It must also cover specialist papers as well as articles with wider, more general appeal. Though who is to judge what is general and what is specialist? An article on the development of micro software for circulation control in a British library might well be too specialised or otherwise not interesting for a small industrial library in Korea. What is one man’s (or woman’s!) meat is, after all, another’s poison.

Two points can be made:

1. 1.

   professionals, in order to thrive and contribute more, must show a greater interest in, and awareness of, what is going on elsewhere; and

2. 2.

   journals, in order to cater for the enormous variances in readers’ interests and levels of understanding, try and offer a balanced coverage and view.

Whilst it may be hoped, it is not really expected that every subscriber will read every article in every issue – if you are not interested in Norway or circulation control or linking networks, then by all means skip those articles.

But I feel it is in the interests of the profession and industry as a whole to have a journal with a broad coverage which includes, admittedly specialist “national”, articles such as the one on Norwegian library automation. Why? Because much of what has been written on national policies, concerns, developments, is in that national language (e.g. Norwegian) and will thus be inaccessible to the vast majority of libraries and information specialists. Just because it happens in, for example, Norway does not mean to say that the technology or techniques or systems or methods or ideas could not profitably be studied and employed elsewhere. Unlike other scientific disciplines, information science and technology do not yet build on the research of others to any great extent. Just check how many papers written by information people, or about information topics, do not contain any references to other literature at all.

This journal will continue to bring you review articles on developments in other countries (e.g. China, Brazil, USSR, South Africa), which you probably would not hear about otherwise by virtue of language or because previous articles have been written for “local” magazines or conferences rather than international areas. And so I make no apologies for giving you a valuable paper, in the next issue, on the past, present and future of library networking in Australia. Maybe you do not care what is happening Down Under, but in the context of being informed, being up-to-date, having a broader view then it must surely be interesting to know.

Besides, this “national” flavour which will appear from time to time, there seems to be another thread reflected in some of the papers that have so far been submitted – that of just what is the electronic library? In this issue there are two short papers on this topic – one by me giving an idea of what can be offered by the electronic library and acting as almost a policy statement for this journal. The other, by Masuda, gives an insight on what the role of the library will be in the future Information Society. A paper to appear in a later issue provides a model for the electronic library and concludes that the future looks good. Going one step further is the article by Grosch, in this issue, which considers the merging of the electronic library with the electronic office to form, in effect, an information resources management system.

If The Electronic Library does not cover what you want it to, or expect it to, please write in or better still, write that article!

AcknowledgementsThis article was first published in The Electronic Library, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1983, pp. 87-8. It has been included in this issue as part of a series of articles celebrating 25 years of the journal.

David RaittEditor of The Electronic Library