Editorial June 2020

Welcome to the June 2020 issue of the Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association (JALIA). We write this editorial in extraordinary times, when libraries and other information agencies are working through how to keep their staff safe AND provide information, entertainment and other services to their communities during a global pandemic. Wonderful work is being done by so many people and organisations to make times of spatial distancing more human and social. Specific to our readership, libraries and museums are offering virtual tours of their collections, virtual story times, enabling access to e- and audio-books, and more, including providing help over the telephone for people like myself who hadn’t managed to sort this out prior to the lockdowns. In times to come we look forward to analyses of the development of these decisions and services, but in the meantime we wish health and safety to our readers, authors and reviewers and more widely the prevention of the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and its associated disease COVID-19.

This issue contains five research, and two research-in-practice papers. Of the research papers, two focussed on public libraries, two on academic libraries and one, on hospital libraries. In our first research paper, Nguyen (2020) explores the influence of ‘humanoid’ or ‘social’ robots in Australian public libraries through the view of librarians and the experience of library clients. This interesting paper provides an evidence-based understanding to support research, planning and implementation of humanoid robot initiatives in Australian public libraries in order to enhance the experience of library user communities. Nguyen’s research was funded by the 2018 ALIA Research Grant Award. Migrating to a new land is not always easy even when preparations have been made to tackle challenges ahead. Khoir and Du (2020) examine instances of uncertainty and confidence faced by Asians and their associated life experiences as they migrated to Australia, acknowledging the important role of public libraries.

Gunapala and colleagues (2020) examine how university libraries manage change in Australian public sector university libraries. As libraries experience significant disruption as a result of technological development driving change, this research identified resources, relevance, stakeholders, strategy, government policy, and university infrastructure as contributing elements to effectively manage change and constructs frameworks that may address challenges of change. The fourth paper in the issue also focuses on an academic library, specifically the Baillieu Library of the University of Melbourne which hosts one of the finest old master’s print collections in Australia. Lo Conte (2020) retraces how the print collection was created and highlights the collection’s teaching function and emphasises how its development was supported by an extraordinary synergy between art historians, the library and local philanthropists.

The final research paper for this issue by Ritchie and colleagues (2020) explores the contributions made by Australian hospital libraries to assist their organisations to achieve accreditation against the National Safety and Quality for Health Services (NSQHS) Standards. The research demonstrates that hospital libraries are integral to a hospital’s quality and safety systems making substantial and essential contributions through their professional information/knowledge management services and by ensuring access to evidence-based resources. The research for this paper was partially funded by the ALIA 2016 research award, and was undertaken in collaboration with the ALIA/Health Libraries Australia and Health Libraries Inc. groups.

The issue also contains two very useful and practical research-in-practice papers. The first acknowledges that traditionally disaster management and recovery have lacked theoretical frameworks and been operationally focused. In this article Missingham and Fletcher (2020) use two case studies; Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand) and the Australian National University (Australia) to assess both the operational and epistemological issues of disaster in order to learn lessons for future approaches to disaster recovery. The final paper for the issue is about systematic and systematic-like reviews which are an important aspect of healthcare research, and are increasingly being employed in other disciplines such as marketing and education (Russell & Muir, 2020). The paper reports a systematic-like review project by the Deakin University Library Health Liaison team and the resulting development of a mediated searching service pilot incorporating a more extensive tiered systematic searching service model (incorporating mediated searching) which is being trialled in 2020.

The issue concludes with eight book reviews, increasingly important as one thing we may all have in the next few months is additional time for reading. We hope you find something in this issue interesting and/or useful. Happy reading!