Editorial

Citation

Gelfand, J. and Riggs, C. (2005), "Editorial", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 22 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2005.23922caa.001

Editorial

Many recent articles and discussions have taken place about the role technology has in encouraging bad behaviors, such as academic misconduct, cheating, invasions of privacy and other incidents. Cell phones can now take photos and even though they may be helpful at a time of an accident to record the damages, etc., they can also be destructive when they capture images and activities for which no permission was granted and are used to store messages that can induce cheating and such activities. This increasing cyber environment, that more people participate in and where a wide range of information is available via the internet, telephone, and a variety of personal digital assistants each of which is functioning in a more wireless environment.

This new sophistication among students and technology connoisseurs begs our attention and we invite future contributions about technology applications and academic usage and what trends are taking shape.

This issue carries coverage of two meetings, another division of the Nigerian Library Association and an eclectic sampling of the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting held in January in brutally cold Boston. The debut of blogging at ALA at this meeting launched by the Public Library Division was of particular interest and preceded the invitation-only "Blogging, Journalism and Credibility Conference," known as "WebCred" held soon after ALA's meeting at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. The documentation for this meeting can be consulted at the conference blog at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/webcred/

Also in this issue, we have a wonderful article about creative work done by a librarian/muralist in San Francisco. Kate Connell has had a long term interest in social action and captures that interest in her murals done with her husband and artist, Oscar Melara and the collections of the Labor Archives and Research Center at the San Francisco State University Library. In addition to describing the motivating factors in the collaborative work, how it evolved, this feature focuses on building a digital file of the work using new methods of technology to archive the content. We are sure that you will join us in concluding how interesting and special this project is and what a joint venture of commitment, and artistic clarity it has become.

Colby Riggs shares a technology review that contextualizes and provides a summary of new web technologies, including a new reference search engine, Answers.com, and two web browsers, Firefox and Netscape 8.0. It is very interesting to see the global developments of such collaborations and the universal outreach and impact each of them has.

Our eProfile for this issue is a review of the new free Scirus® which is a comprehensive science-specific search engine on the internet with more than 167 million science-specific web pages. Gerry McKiernan introduces its potential and coverage and suggests what its impact may be compared to other existing resources of its genre.

Idea Group Reference has released a very ambitious reference product, The Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology and a review for that source is before the New Books Column. We encourage other reviews of works that will likely be of interest to a wide range of libraries and librarians.

So, we are entering into the spring and summer season of library conferences and we would welcome your participation in covering some of these meetings and emphasizing the technology focus of the meetings and the trends that support it. What is happening, changing in libraries? We know that staff members are busier, always in a learning curve and trying to work on multiple things simultaneously. We just want to know what some of those things are. Please share with us.

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