Editorial

Citation

(2006), "Editorial", Interlending & Document Supply, Vol. 34 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ilds.2006.12234baa.001

Editorial

This issue of ILDS has a truly global reach; articles from and about South Africa, Finland, Norway, Hong Kong and the UK. Partly this reflects the publication of some revised and updated papers from the 9th ILDS conference held in Tallinn in the autumn of 2005, a memorable and enjoyable conference. Preparations are underway for the next conference to be held in Singapore in 2007.

There is much promotion of how heavily full text databases of journals are being used but what about the low use material? In “Electronic journals: are they really used?” the authors throw some light on this area of much interest to ILDS librarians but little investigated – or at least if it is nobody is writing about it. Three Finnish librarians write on developments in that country – “Sharing resources in Finnish university libraries” – including the impact of “Big Deals” and the move to patron initiated document supply. The National Health Service in the UK is so large and complex that its management often defeats the best of minds. The current financial crisis involving the forced retirement of the Chief Executive is just the latest example. However progress is being made on the needs of tens of thousands of NHS workers who need easily accessible medical information. Two NHS librarians describe the project to provide desk top document supply in “Informing interlibrary networking and document supply in the English National Health Service”. South Africa has had a complex and fraught history over the past 50 years leading to the ended of apartheid 15 years ago. Apartheid had a negative effect of document supply and this and other developments are reported in “Developments in South African document supply: the experience of the University of Witwatersrand”. Grey literature is a valuable but under used resource. The British Library amongst others does its best to collect it and make it accessible the users. Their efforts are described in “Grey literature at The British Library” – revealing a hidden resource. The next issue of ILDS will include an article covering developments in this area in France. The massive task of creating a resource sharing network between the eight Hong Kong universities is described by the librarians in the thick of it – “User-initiated resource sharing in Hong Kong universities: planning to reality with HKALL”. The development of a document supply database is described in “The Norwegian ‘Bibliotek’ database in a Nordic ILDS perspective”. Finally your editor contributes another long literature review – there is so much going on that it is difficult to keep it shorter – Interlending and Document Supply: a review of the recent literature – 55.