The Australian Library Journal

Evolutions

[Editorial] John Levett
Another year has begun! As readers of inCite will know, the process of bringing ALIA and ACLIS together to form one peak organisation is moving ahead. The auspices are good and the challenges considerable. A big year ahead!

In this issue we publish for the first time [or rather, republish] an article which we first encountered via the internet, which led to some internal speculation about the nature of this journal and its future. When we had our first run as editor in 1981, we had around 12 articles in hand for each one we had space for, and as part of the process of reflection we went back to some of those 1980s issues. The comparison is interesting: it seems clear that what we are now publishing is much more mature, professionally speaking, than the material of seventeen years ago. The 1980s, although not as bountiful as the 70s had been for libraries were still, comparatively, the years of plenty, and the mad barking of the economic rationalists was only distantly heard.

The copy we were getting still had something of innocence about it, the faint echoes of the humanistic movements of the 60s and 70s. Today we are much more serious, and in a sense more intense; we have been tempered in the fire of the political process, and there is little room for humour, wit, or light-heartedness. We have also matured, academically speaking: from that first beginning at the University of New South Wales in 1961, we now have a number of established schools with a solid foundation in both the contemporary processes of the profession and in research. Doctorates, whilst still not common, are much more frequently encountered, and they rest on work performed within the boundaries of our disciplines.

We have learned to form productive alliances within the academy, and although we have moved further from our foundations in the humanities than this practitioner is comfortable with, we have made remarkable, indeed astonishing progress in the extent to which we are exploiting, adapting and applying the new technology. One small aspect of this is in the processes applied to the production of this journal. In 1981 we worked with paper copy, and learned laboriously the art of marking it up under the tutelage of the redoubtable Irene Strachan, the conceiver and christener of inCite and the Association's publications officer at that time.

It was a slow, painful and inflexible process: it was not unknown for contributions to arrive in manuscript, or at best, indifferent typing, although those with power and influence could use their secretaries. Nowadays our authors are much more fluent, at ease with the keyboard and the word-processing package. Copy arrives on disk or as an e-mail attachment, and we can forward copy backwards and forwards across the Pacific Ocean more quickly than in former days we moved it around Australia. Ideas can be floated, explored, discussed and exploited as readily as if colleagues who work 10 000 kilometres away were in the same building. Introductions are readily made via e-mail and real friendships formed with people whom one may never meet.

[Curiously, though, this facility is not having much effect on incoming correspondence: letters to the editor are still as rare as they were when in 1982 we published a blank page headed 'Letters to the editor' with Eric Moon's comment about correspondence and the intellectual health of a profession tucked away in 10-point type and not seen or ignored by those people who rang or wrote to us to say that we had a blank page in that issue: had we noticed?]

A logical evolution in this process will be to develop the electronic version of ALJ; already, much of the work is already being done, and very little will be required to put text up on ALIA's website. This does not mean that we are contemplating the abandonment of the paper version: our position on this is that at least for the foreseeable future the medium of record will be the paper one [even though we are not yet on acid-free paper!]. Further, the paper format is more accessible [we think] to the majority of our readers than the electronic form, although this is a question which requires some further consideration. What it lacks, however, is the connectivity of the electronic form where hot-linked URLs can be distributed throughout the text, including the references and bibliography, which facility is to this reader one of the inestimably valuable aspects of the technology.

Quite apart from the physical and intellectual aspects of obtaining, producing and reticulating copy, we are finding that with the academic maturity referred to earlier, and the introduction of the refereeing process for major contributions, copy published in ALJ is being used in the assessment of academic reputation, including of course, individual promotion. In itself, this is a good thing: the process of securing referees, feeding copy to them, assessing their reactions and [in some cases] acting as go-between for author and referee is an enriching one, and goes some way to the enhancement of connectivity in the profession. There is of course a danger that the Journal may tend to become, as so many academic journals have already become, merely a vehicle for the establishment of the credentials of contributors, and thus suffer a narrowing of focus and the onset of intellectual inbreeding or fragmentation as more and more specialist journals germinate in the rich and highly fertilised soils of the academies; we will do our best to prevent this.

In this issue some of Dietrich Borchardt's friends and colleagues remember him; we understand that his contribution will be dealt with more extensively in AARL later this year. Yakim Akdeniz of the United Kingdom Internet Watch Foundation raises the old issue of 'Quis custodiet?' in an examination of recent trends to interpose screens between Internet content and the reader; Lynne Benton looks at literature on the subject of TAFE - university amalgamations and the implications for library services. Sylvia Edwards and Barbara Ewers review the results of a recent survey of business information users in Brisbane, and Jenny Thornely reports on the use of metadata by the State Library of Queensland. Tim Schwager, a Sydney architect, offers his views on public library architecture with particular reference to three recent commissions and their outcomes. Matthew Allen and Lothar Retzlaff speculate on the implications of information technology for libraries in the twenty-first century. And of course there is the now customary and very welcome clutch of reviews organised by Dr Gary Gorman, our reviews editor. No letters: but we live in hope.