Citation
Breen, E. (2006), "Guest editorial", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 23 No. 9. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2006.23923iaa.001
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2006, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Guest editorial
Having been the manager of this publication for the past eight years, it is interesting to reflect on how advances in technology since 1998 have affected Library Hi Tech News (LHTN) itself.
LHTN began to be published electronically from issue 3 1999. This was in HTML format when previously the journal had been in paper format only. It became joined up with the other library and information serials of Emerald Group through its fulltext database; and became accessible not only directly from Emerald online, but also via electronic journal delivery services, aggregator databases and indexing and abstracting services.
Journal content published January 2005 onwards was published in PDF as well as HTML format, which made it fully searchable and retrievable by keyword as well as full text. During 2006, RSS feed and online manuscript submission were introduced.
The reach and usability of this publication has therefore expanded through use of technology. Downloads from the journal have been as follows:
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2002 – 10,074.
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2003 – 11,702.
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2004 – 13,524.
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2005 – 26,916.
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2006 to 3rd quarter end – 35,950.
These have been from the UK, the Far East, Australasia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe as well as North America. Indeed, there has been a higher percentage of downloads from the UK in 2006 than from North America by the end of the 3rd quarter.
Moreover, LHTN is a permanent record of what is happening in the world of library technology at a time when much informal communication is ephemeral. Blogs and wikis have the advantage of speed to publication, but are not preserved. LHTN, over time, is an archive of happenings and opinions; while scholarly journals communicate research in the field. Of the more than 5,000 downloads which have taken place of 1999 conference reports and feature articles since 2002, more than one thousand of them were in 2006. Since 2002, there have been 14,000 article downloads of the content which was published in 2001; 2,5000 of these were made during 2006.
I wonder whether the blog and wiki postings of today will be able to be used in five years' time. Food for thought.
Eileen BreenManaging Editor