Editorial: Catching Up With LRTS

Rachel E. Scott and Michael Fernandez

As we write this in July, it’s in the midst of record heatwaves and vacation travel, not to mention the start of the new fiscal year for many libraries. So it feels somewhat odd to be putting together our final issue of 2023. With that said, the amount of activity that’s already taken place by midsummer within Library Resources & Technical Services (LRTS) and ALA Core at large could fill a calendar year and then some. In pulling together this issue’s editorial, we felt it would be a good opportunity to get our readers up to speed with recent developments impacting Core as well as previewing what to expect in 2024.

The first update we’d like to share is one that has been initiated by the ALA Publications Committee with potential impacts across all of ALA. The Publications Committee has formed a publication ethics working group. The need for such a group was surfaced in the wake of a recent Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology article that advocated for greater transparency in the publication process through publicly available ethics guidelines and policies.1 In developing a charge for the publication ethics working group, the scholarly publication landscape will be surveyed for examples of ethics guidelines, with a goal of coordinating unified policies across all ALA publications. The work of organizations such as COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) has been identified as a potential model for moving forward in this area. As the activity of the working group comes into sharper focus, we’ll share additional updates on their progress.

Our next update is on a recently implemented policy across the three ALA Core Journals. The Name Change Policy actually took effect last year, but we wanted to use this space to call attention to it, as we feel it’s important. Authors may change their names for any number of reasons, including gender identity, marital status, or religious affiliation. The policy offers a simple way for authors to voluntarily submit their name change information to Core journal editors, who will ensure that correct name information is applied to the requested publications. No acknowledgement that the name change was made will be visible in the article. We would like to acknowledge that this policy is indebted to the trailblazing efforts of groups like COPE’s Author Name Changes Working Group and others who have advocated for similar policies at publishing bodies like the Association for Computing Machinery.2 Within Core, the editors of LRTS and our colleagues at Information Technology and Libraries (ITAL) and Library Leadership & Management (LL&M) worked to coordinate and adopt a uniform name change policy across all three journals. We feel that advancing this policy is necessary out of respect for our contributing authors. Without their hard work and tireless research, our journals would not exist.

Another ALA Core Journals update relates to progress on the implementation of a more sustainable funding model. The Core Publications Coordinating Committee recently approved the editors’ proposal to set up the American Library Association/Core Division Open Access Journals package with subscription agents. The editors have been in contact with representatives from the major library subscription agents, with the goal of making it as straightforward for libraries to support keeping ITAL, LL&M, and LRTS open. Spreading the open access publishing costs across many institutions ensures sustainable and fair funding of these journals. With your participation, you secure the availability and independence of three fundamental library and information science journals into the future. Participating institutions will be acknowledged on the Core website; we hope you’ll consider investing a small portion of your collections budget with ALA Core Journals.

Our final announcement is specific to LRTS, and we’re particularly excited about it! A year ago in this very space we announced the CFP for a special themed issue on open access within the areas of collections, scholarly communications, acquisitions, and cataloging. Readers, you have answered that call! In the last month, we have been overwhelmed (in the best possible sense) with author submissions on open access topics covering the myriad facets of openness encompassed by the scope of LRTS. We are currently doing the labor intensive but rewarding work of reviewing submissions, following up with authors, and assigning peer reviewers. It’s an all hands on deck situation for the editorial board, but we think the end result will be a special themed issue that truly is special. We wanted to celebrate our first year of being fully open access and mark the occasion with an issue that would highlight our commitment to showcasing the work being done by libraries in this important area. If you couldn’t tell, we’re pretty hyped on what’s coming next from LRTS; we hope you are too! Before getting ahead of ourselves though, we’re pleased to bring you this issue which has another round of excellent content from our contributors.

In this issue:

• The Association for Library Collections & Technical Services task force group that authored the Core Competencies for Cataloging and Metadata Professional Librarians followed up on the release of that document to assess its use and provide recommendations for its future. The authors—Bruce J. Evans, Jennifer Liss, Maurine McCourry, Susan Rathbun-Grubb, Beth Shoemaker, Karen Snow, and Allison Yanos—surveyed the community to evaluate how it is being used, by whom, and its perceived shortcomings. Although it has been downloaded over 40,000 times since its publication, results indicate that a majority (65 percent) have not used the Core Competencies for Cataloging and Metadata Professional Librarians in their work. Qualitative analysis points to strategies to update and improve the document as well as to opportunities to promote it.
• Wayne de Fremery and Michael Buckland advocate for more useful, reader-oriented catalogs in “The Work in Question.” By exploring the practical and theoretical challenges of Seymour Lubetzky’s influential conceptual model that defines work as a literary creation that might have multiple expressions and physical versions and then applying that analysis to FRBR, de Fremery and Buckland envision a more user-centered way forward. The authors suggest that FRBR and other frameworks that utilize works as central entities could be made more useable and useful if work were deemphasized and seen as one among many concepts used for aggregating sets and supersets of objects.
• In “Evaluating Purchase Plans for Niche Collecting Areas,” Victoria Koger and Virginia Kay Williams investigate a research university library’s approval plans for art exhibition catalogues and juvenile books. The authors explain how they assessed these plans and their usage, share findings that recommend purchase plans in certain circumstances—but not in others, reflect on how this work informed the creation of a collection assessment plan, and provide a rationale for assessing niche purchase plans at your library.
• Books reviewed include Making the Most of Your ILS: A User’s Guide to Evaluating and Optimizing Library Systems by Lynn E. Gates and Joel D. Tonyan, Taxonomies: Practical Approaches to Developing and Managing Vocabularies for Digital Information edited by Helen Lippell, and Copyright and Course Reserves by Carla S. Myers.

Notes

1. Lucy Santos Green and Melissa P. Johnston, “A Contextualization of Editorial Misconduct in the Library and Information Science Academic Information Ecosystem,” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 73, no. 7 (2022): 913–28, https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24593.
2. COPE, Update on COPE guidance regarding author name changes, https://publicationethics.org/news/update-cope-guidance-regarding-author-name-changes; ACM Publications Policy on Author Name Changes, https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/author-name-changes.