Introduction

For 40 years, the Distance Library Services conference (DLS) has been successfully connecting librarians and administrators together to advance library resources and services at a distance or online. The DLS Conference is distance librarianship’s premier event. The 2022 DLS conference was held hybrid on Purdue University’s West Lafayette campus on July 26–28, 2022. The conference featured presentations, lightning talks, poster sessions, panels, and workshops. Most sessions were in person and some were hybrid. There were many opportunities for onsite and virtual attendees learning about distance librarians’ efforts to advance library resources and services to support the needs of our students, instructors, and institutions.

The pandemic of these past two years has reinforced the need to be thinking about the topics DLS conference has been working on for so long. There is a ‘new normal’ of integrated in-person and remote education, adopting methodologies that those of us at DLS have embraced for, literally, decades.

This special issue of the Journal of Library and Information Services in Distance Learning provides a forum for librarians, educators, and researchers to discuss current trends, innovations, and challenges in advancing library resources and services at a distance or online. This issue features, as it has for many years since 2012, the full-text paper presentations from the 2022 DLS Conference. The papers published in this issue include research and instruction endeavors of distance librarians.

We want to thank the members of the conference planning committee Anne Casey, Mou Chakraborty, Thom Gerrish, Kelli Johnson, Kat Phillips, Jodi Poe, and Torrie Raish, especially Rachel Fundator and Clarence Maybee for coordinating the review and selection of papers, and many thanks to all of our peer reviewers, who made the submissions that much better. We invite you to learn along with us the results of our presenters’ work, so that you can apply it to your own practice and research.

Conflict of interest

The authors have no conflicts of interest to report.