Editorial

This issue captures a couple of important meetings – the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting held in Seattle, the American Association of the Advancement of Science held in San Francisco and both although very different chronicle how critical technology is the professional lives we now lead. Librarians and scientists are terribly dependent on how to search,capture, preserve, and cite elements of information found in a wide variety of sources.

We also have a report about a program in Nigeria that builds on an ongoing theme that as invested in and committed to technology and electronic resources as we are in many parts of the world, it is still uneven in large pockets and building ways to train library staff to reduce digital divides is a critical component to leveling the global competition in our market driven economies.

By the time you get this National Library Week will have just been celebrated in the USA. This is an increasingly important time for public libraries, some school libraries and academic libraries to showcase what they do with public funding and how welcoming they are to their constituencies of users. There are collaborations with publishers, information providers, media services to promote and demonstrate all the new formats and technologies that find homes in libraries and serve users in different ways. There are competitions, reading,lectures, book clubs, and other programs that bring people to consider the value of their library to them in daily life.

The Mortenson Center at the University of Illinois, Champaign–Urbana is a very well respected international center for librarians to come, share, and learn. Two librarians from Nigeria and Japan who participated in the last seminar for international scholars share their experience and how much they learned and how they plan to apply it.

We will follow-up with them after they are home for about six months and see what results the application process had in their own institutions from the ideas that they picked up during this program.

Aimee Fifarek writes a column that expands upon this in her expose on the range of professional and business literature sources available today.

She highlights a few titles that may be on the primary reading list of library staff, however, we would venture to say that most librarians probably do not follow or read any of these publications regularly. It is probably sufficient to say that because they are not refereed journals, one reads many of them like newspapers, irregularly and irreverently and depends of the important content to surface in multiple sources.

There are literally scores of such resources, and this brief column reiterates how widely we must cast our line to follow new developments outside of the traditional reading we all track. There are so many new resources and interesting publications with submissions from people in different walks of life who contribute to how we think of information seeking, retrival and evaluation,new products and ways of doing things.

Lots of things are happening around the world. We are busy tracking the active conference schedule and discovering new situations of where people are doing some rather incredible things.

We look forward to you contributions and feedback.

Julia Gelfand(jgelfand@uci.edu)Mitchell Brown(mcbrown@uci.edu)Co-editors, LHTN