Editorial

Citation

Tedd, L.A. (2010), "Editorial", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 44 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/prog.2010.28044daa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Program: electronic library and information systems, Volume 44, Issue 4

In October 2009, I was privileged to be able to attend a gathering of librarians in the People’s Republic of China at an event organised by Emerald’s China office. Staff there had asked whether one of the editors of Emerald’s journals ranked by Thomson/Reuters Institute for Scientific Information could attend the gathering and talk on some relevant current developments. The event was held in Wuhan, a city of some eight million people on the Yangtse River in the centre of China, and some 60 or so directors of major university libraries in the country were present. There are about 2,000 universities in China – with about 100 being allocated as “high-level” universities – and so receive more money for resources such as library materials and access to electronic publications. The talks at the conference were in Mandarin, but I was able to gather a “flavour” of topics discussed which included the challenges of providing access to a range of e-resources, use made of e-resources by students and so on. My presentation (on digital libraries, universities and the journal Program: Electronic Library and Information Systems) was delivered in English, but staff from the China office of Emerald had kindly added appropriate Chinese language additions to my prepared Powerpoint. I also had the opportunity when in China to give a lecture to some 60 undergraduate and postgraduate library and information science students at Beijing Normal University. I was greatly impressed with their enthusiasm, and their knowledge of digital library matters.

China is emerging as a major market for publishers such as Emerald. Each month I am presented with detailed statistics of the number of papers published in the journal which have been downloaded by customers of Emerald in different countries. The latest Figures (provided in early July 2010) indicate that China appears sixth in the list of countries (after the UK, India, the USA, Malaysia and Australia) for numbers of users downloading articles from Program: Electronic Library and Information Systems.

There is obviously much happening in the area of digital library developments in China and neighbouring countries. In 2009, there was a special issue (Vol. 27 No. 2) of our “sister” journal, The Electronic Library, guest edited by Jin Chen and Jing Guo of Shanghai Jiao Tong University Library (SJTUL). The issue contains selected papers from the 2008 Digital Library Conference held in Shanghai and hosted by SJTUL, including one by the editors giving details of innovative digital developments at their library (Guo and Chen, 2009). More recently, Wang and Chen (2010) have reported on the developments of the China Academic Digital Library Information Systems (CADLIS). We have also included papers in Program: Electronic Library and Information Systems from China, with a recent one being from Wuhan University on the long-term preservation of digital information (Liu and Du, 2009).

On my return from China, it seemed appropriate to attempt to bring together a number of papers covering developments in China as well as other countries in the region to form a “special” issue. Staff in the Emerald China Office, especially Kathy Xu, were most helpful in bringing this all to fruition. In this issue, we therefore have papers based on presentations given in Wuhan as well as other papers that were submitted quite independently. I hope you find them interesting.

Lucy A. Tedd