Editorial

Citation

Gelfand & Colby Riggs, J. (2003), "Editorial", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 20 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2003.23920baa.001

Editorial

In these unpredictable times, it is difficult to predict what should be written six-eight weeks prior to the actual release of the issue. We have difficult, volatile scenarios playing out politically, economically, and socially around the globe. We should all conclude that we must respect each other, our governments and public policies, and the technology that allows us to communicate across time zones with one another and share information as widely for instruction, research and to preserve our historical records.

This issue reaffirms how critical communication is to our personal and professional lives. Roy Tennant shares how the Web4Lib electronic discussion group has come to celebrate its tenth anniversary and how important a role it has played since the Web was launched and became our new platform to mount and organize information.

Copyright issues confront libraries and their staff around the globe. Even with the United States Supreme Court voting to extend copyright terms in the highly debated Eldred case, there are many related issues that librarians are concerned about. We have a very good article that describes the outreach work of librarians at Washburn University in educating their campus community about copyright issues.

We also have an article from staff at JSTOR who have shared the sagas of increasingly easy access to licensed content even with a proxy server in place. These serious infringements threaten our access and cause concerns to institutional subscribers. As individuals become increasingly clever in breaking codes, manipulating the technologies in place, we remain curious to what new options and applications are out there to remedy these problems.

Conferences continue to take place around the world every day of the year. We have some interesting reports of meetings that took place in recent months that are sure to open your eyes enough to say that "I should know about this"; it is likely that these reports fill that gap. Global coverage is something we are trying to promote and we welcome another Around the World column in this issue which takes us to the Indian Institute of Astrophysics Library in Bangalore to learn about its library technology applications.

The eProfile column by Gerry McKiernan includes the first of three anticipated columns on Scholar-Based Innovations in Publishing. Without some very exciting new tools and support, faculty and scientists may not be so eager to explore publishing alternatives. This first column is dedicated to the individual and institutional issues related to scholars as publishers and we will look forward to future follow-ups and issues in this increasingly necessary evolution in scholarly communications. The E-book Currents column picks up on book and other ePublishing initiatives in the commercial and scholarly publishing environments.

We have a new team of contributing editors handling the New & Noteworthy and Calendar/Diary sections. We are proud to introduce and welcome Elizabeth (Zoe) Stewart-Marshall, Database Quality and Authorities Librarian at Cornell University's Central Technical Service, and Heidi Hanson, Systems Librarian at the University of Maryland, College Park Libraries. They can be contacted with submissions and ideas at their e-mail addresses on the list of contributing editors in each issue and we look forward to their contributions to LHTN.

Have a good read.

Julia Gelfand(jgelfand@uci.edu)Colby Riggs(cmriggs@uci.edu)Co-editors