A journal about using the Internet for reference purposes which manages to misquote its own URL (Uniform Resource Locator) does not exactly fill one with confidence, yet this is what Internet Reference Services Quarterly manages to do thanks to a misplaced “/” in the editorial. URL typographical errors abound in printed publications, and Web addresses are notoriously difficult to transcribe, although the problem seems to be decreasing with time and a tendency to shorten them, use only lower case letters, and include recognizable words in the place of seemingly random sequences of letters. The correct address for the IRSQ Web page is http://www.cobleskill.edu/service/lrc/insq/ and on visiting the site I was struck by the Tables of Contents and by how many papers have apparently already been written and are waiting for formal publication. Volume 1, Number 1 of IRSQ is currently available in print, yet the publication schedule already includes papers in Volume 2 Number 3, which is due late in 1997. My initial admiration for the editor‐in‐chief of IRSQ, Lyn Elizabeth Martin, was tempered by the realization that by the time they are printed, much of the content of these papers will surely be dated.
The charter issue of IRSQ, appearing during the Fall of 1996 consists of Part 1 of the proceedings of the Spring 1995 Conference of the Eastern New York Chapter of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ENYIACRL) which was held in March 1995. In the lifetime of the Internet, 18 months is a long time, and the delay in publication certainly shows in the lack of currency of some of the papers presented here. Perhaps a better title for this issue of the journal might have been “History of Internet Reference Services Quarterly”, because this is, to a considerable extent, what is delivered with Volume 1 Number 1. The first article is actually about the history of professional activities on network development, despite its baffling title of “Ak‐Del‐Em‐Nor‐Su” (which is contrived from the occurrences of the letters in various acronyms of library and computer organizations), and the second article informs us of certain characteristics of 96 patrons of the University Library of the University of Albany, SUNY, who used Internet terminals during January and February 1995. History in the form of a discussion about the development of a Gopher service at the University of Michigan Documents Center, takes up a considerable part of another paper, as it does in an analysis of user surveys conducted in 1992/1993 and 1993/1994 at California State University in one of the remaining papers. To cap it all are two reviews of books published in 1995.
On the evidence presented, I cannot agree with Professor William A. Katz who states on the flyer accompanying the journal that “... no library can afford to end this century and go for 2001 without a subscription”, but perhaps the professor has already had access to the forthcoming papers we will not receive until nearer the year to which he refers. Some of these, according to the Tables of Contents at the Web site, look extremely interesting and include titles such as “Practical solutions for Web instruction”, “Designing a Web page for a law library”, “Technical Report Literature on the World Wide Web”, and “Using the Internet for document delivery”. So come on Haworth Press ... what you have here is a good concept, and a reasonable price ... forget the present publication cycle and give us those tasty papers before they too become history.
