| Editorial: New Directions | |
| Mary Beth Weber | |
I officially become LRTS editor in January 2013 and will chair the LRTS editorial board meeting during the 2013 ALA Midwinter Meeting. I have been working with Peggy Johnson during the transition period between editors. It has been very exciting and enlightening. The amount of behind-the-scenes work and the number of people involved with producing an issue of LRTS is mind-boggling. While I am very excited about my new role and have ideas for LRTS, I am also nervous about succeeding Peggy! Her name has been synonymous with LRTS and the gold standard of publishing in technical services for the last nine years. Besides Peggy’s departure as editor, eight members rotate off the board. Rather than viewing this as a predicament, I see it as an opportunity. I look forward to working with the LRTS board as we enter a new phase for the journal and build on the excellent work produced by Peggy and past LRTS editorial boards. I welcome the opportunity to work with Tim Clifford at ALA Publishing, our outstanding production editor, and Christine McConnell, ALCTS’ publications specialist.
Transitions also are taking place within our profession. RDA is only one. Preservation metadata, patron-driven acquisitions in its various forms, shrinking technical services departments, changing roles for technical services librarians, research data sets, and implementation of discovery layers are a few of the hot topics in technical services and areas I hope will be addressed in LRTS. I recently co-moderated the ALCTS c-forum “Publish with ALCTS!” with Dina Giambi, ALCTS Publications Committee chair, and Jeanne Drewes, ALCTS Papers Series editor. The e-forum generated a wonderful discussion on how to get started with publishing. I was contacted afterward by a number of interested potential authors, and I hope to see submissions from them. The e-forum discussion is archived at http://lists.ala.org/wws/info/alcts-eforum (note: you must be subscribed to the e-forum to access the archives). I welcome submissions or queries regarding possible topics from both ALCTS members and nonmembers. I will have a LRTS page in ALA Connect starting in January to make announcements, to get feedback from readers and potential authors, and to facilitate discussion.
Papers on technical services issues faced by public and community college libraries are underrepresented in LRTS. I encourage people working in those institutions to consider submitting a paper. In addition to research papers, LRTS publishes “Notes on Operations,” which are case studies, and solicits literature reviews. ALCTS-sponsored grants for up to $1,000 are available to support the writing of literature reviews for LRTS. A call for proposals for review of the acquisitions and serials literature for 2012–13 will be issued in January 2013. Lastly, LRTS occasionally includes guest editorials.
In closing, I would like to provide a preview of the contents of this issue of LRTS. Magda El-Sherbini describes the processes developed and implemented at the Bibliotheca Alexamdrina (BA) to enable authority control in a multiscript environment. Seungmin Lee, Taewoo Nam, and Youngjoon Nam outline a proposal to revise cataloging rules and standards to meet the needs of people with disabilities. Laura McCann discusses using MARC data to provide conservation documentation in research libraries. Jeffrey D. Kushkowski and Charles B. Shrader provide insight into the implications of developing a core list of journals in an interdisciplinary area.
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