Editorial

This issue has been delayed due to some personal circumstances by your co-editor, but nevertheless comes to you with interesting and diverse content. You will be receiving this at the launch of the new year and with that we extend best wishes for a safe, healthy, and peaceful new year. The conference reports reflect some summer 2006 meetings including Annual IFLA Conference held in Seoul. Emerald, our publishing family is a major sponsor of IFLA and that generous spirit of goodwill and involvement demonstrates the role it plays in promoting discussion about some of the most pressing issues facing the field of library and information science. The global arena levels the digital divide,while detecting where it is most visible and addressing ways that it can be better addressed and treated. There is also a conference report of the Nigerian Library Association and the Annual LITA Forum, which is the major North American pulse on Library Automation.

Our report from the Forum is provided by our co-editor, Colby Riggs, for whom this is her last issue in that capacity. Hopefully she will continue to contribute to the publication as her schedule allows. Her popular columns on IT gadgets and her leadership in library technology issues has been reflected in numerous columns, articles and demonstrated throughout the eight years we have been working together on this journal. Personally, I want to thank her for all her contributions and offer her good cheer as we have looked for content in many sources. It has been a remarkable partnership.

The next issue will introduce a new co-editor, Mitchell Brown and some new contributing editors. This issue has another feature and is a rather interesting piece we chose to include to illustrate the variation of library orientation sessions that are conducted around the world. Two authors from Nigeria share a script or description of a library orientation session they do for their new students at Delta State University. It is clear that the library environment is very different, still relying on a physical card catalog with only 20 workstations including those for library staff and administrative functions. Thus, the demand for library services and resources is very competitive and the nature of library services quite different from an institution that can depend on an online catalog, self-checkout, online processing via a bibliographic utility, reliable and 24/7 networking and connectivity, virtual reference, many eResources and other forms of automation that contribute to a high degree of self-service and remote access. Traditional library services are in fact very much operational in many parts of the world.

Emerald, our publisher, was among sponsors at the RFID Conference held in London November 13, 2006 and hosted by CILIP. This is the first among those papers we will publish and in coming issues. It tells the experience of a large County Public Library's adoption and promotion of RFID and gives some important background about the RFID movement.

Lots of changes are taking place in the library workplace. Increasingly strategic planning exercises are being conducted to offer short and long term planning exercises to determine the kind of organization and culture that will be present in coming years and what the trajectories are to achieve it. Most libraries claim to be user-centered and try to respond to expectations and in future issues we will explore how some of that is being conducted and rolled out. We also want to explore how the role of library staff continues to change due to technology and what kind of technology training is most needed in different kinds of libraries. If you want to contribute to any of these issues beyond reading about them in coming months, we hope that you will contact us. In future issues we will be having more content relevant to our readers in public libraries and invited columnists to spark the issue with interesting trends in library technology.

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