Notes to contributors

The Editor welcomes inquiries from prospective authors, and these notes are intended to give some guidance to anyone who would like to submit.

Manuscripts should not exceed 5 000 words. They should be submitted to the Editor electronically, preferably by email attachment.

Authors should indicate their position, email and postal addresses, and employing institution if applicable. A brief abstract (up to 300 words, preferably structured in format) should accompany all articles.

All submissions should contain 'Implications for best practice' - up to six points which summarise the article's findings in a way which is accessible to practitioners. These should highlight the implications for evidence-based policy and/or practice.

The best guide to current ALJ style is the material appearing in the journal itself.

Footnotes are not acceptable. Explanatory and supplementary material should appear in the text or be omitted; it should not appear in the references. As an Australian scholarly journal, ALJ follows the usage of The Macquarie Dictionary and the Chicago manual of style: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html.

Some simple stylistic requirements:

• no double spaces between a full stop and the following sentence
• contractions do not need a full stop following as in Dr or vol
• abbreviations are rarely written - do not use don't
• acronyms are written without full stops, for example RSPCA, ACT
• avoid double paragraph returns
• do not underline for emphasis - use italics
• use single quotes ('...') throughout except for embedded quotes [that is, quotes within quotes]

All substantial articles offered to ALJ go through a double-blind peer review process.

To allow enough time for the peer review processes and authors' revisions, these copy deadlines are intended as a general guide - 1st November, 1st February, 1st May, 1st August for issues 1, 2, 3 and 4 of the year.

Librarianship-in-Practice articles

The Librarianship-in-Practice section contains fairly short articles of around 2,000-2,500 words (excluding abstracts, graphics/tables/figures, references and acknowledgements) for practitioners to submit case studies on projects or programmes that they have implemented, set out in the following structure:

1. The Issue - what is the issue/topic/project/problem and why is it important? How does this relate to the practice and/or theory of librarianship? For example, does it fit into one of the main areas such as collection development, cataloguing and classification, reference and research, user education (or information literacy training), library management, collaboration and networking, professional development?
2. Initial Assessment - describe the initial assessment of the situation
3. Action - what action was undertaken or solution selected to address the issue? A short description of the process that was followed in implementing the solution.
4. Results - evaluation of results or outcomes, or if no formal (summative) evaluation has been conducted, an assessment of the process to date (process or formative evaluation) should be provided.
5. Lessons Learned - what are the conclusions, including implications for best (or good) practice if another library wanted to apply your findings in a similar situation?

An abstract of up to 250 words (not included in the article word count) should follow the outline above (1-5).

The submissions will be peer reviewed.