Editorial March 2019

Welcome to the first 2019 issue of the Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association (JALIA). We begin the year with a reminder about two things. First that we currently have a call for papers out for a Special Issue: Serving the whole person in GLAMs to be edited by Kiersten F. Latham & Noah Lenstra. Papers for the issue are due to be submitted by Monday 29 April. Further information is available online at https://tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24750158.2018.1535220

Secondly, there are four regular sections of the Journal:

• 1. peer-reviewed research papers;

• 2. peer-reviewed research-in-practice papers;

• 3. information-in-practice papers; and,

• 4. book reviews.

Instructions for authors are available at the following link: http://tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=ualj21&page=instructions

In addition to the regular sections, we encourage research students to submit short summaries of around 500 words of their projects and will consider submissions of opinion pieces. While opinion pieces are not common in our field, they are scholarly essays that present a personal point of view critiquing a topic and we encourage the submission of these when written in a scholarly manner. They are designed to make us think and question – the very activities we like to think that the Journal enables. If you wish to submit either of these kinds of papers please be in touch with the editorial team at [email protected].

Now to introduce this issue. It does not have an explicit theme, but it does include representatives of each of the four regular paper types. The first peer-reviewed research paper is by Philip Hider and titled From Anderson to ORDAC: A history of bibliographic policy discussion in Australia. It is a history of national bibliographic policy discussion in Australia, from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day, assessing the contribution this discussion has made to the development of international bibliographic standards. The second is on quite a different topic. Margaret Merga’s paper, Do librarians feel that their profession is valued in contemporary schools? finds that teacher librarians do not typically feel secure in the knowledge that their profession is valued. The paper identifies and discusses a range of factors that contribute to this perspective and demonstrates teacher librarians are often advocates for their role and that school administrators may play a powerful role in promoting the valuing of this profession. The final research paper by Sajjad Ullah Jan and Mumtaz Ali Anwar is titled Emotional Intelligence, Library Use and Academic achievement of University Students explores the association between emotional intelligence, library-use and academic achievement among undergraduate university students in Pakistan, and makes a case for librarians to recognise this connection in order to better help students’ use of the library and also reduce library anxiety.

There are two research-in-practice paper, the first which looks at micro-credentials. Christine Ruddy’s & Frank Ponte’s paper Preparing students for University studies and beyond: A micro-credential trial that delivers Academic integrity awareness provides a background to micro-credentials and chronicles the development of an academic integrity awareness micro-credential for new student entrants to university. The second by Sandy Rae, Margaret Hunn and Ana Lobo, titled Sustainable, continuous improvement in online academic and information literacy support builds on previous research that evaluated the impact of an embedded online academic and information literacy module into the Learning Management System of a first-year university business course. The current paper reports on data has been gathered over the years 2014 to 2017 45 courses and addresses issues of sustainability that have arisen over time.

We also have an information-in-practice paper by Edward Luca, titled Reflections on an embedded librarianship approach: the challenge of developing disciplinary expertise in a new subject area.

The paper provides some background on the role of embedded librarians and, in common with the paper by Rae et al. discusses some of the challenges around the scale and sustainability of such specialised support.

We are also fortunate to have two research student project summaries. Romany Manuell writes about her project which investigates The education and training role of Australian academic librarians and Josh Carter about his which investigates the role of Australian Libraries and the Promotion of LGBTQI rights.

The issue concludes with a great selection of 13 book reviews edited by Alison Fields. We hope you enjoy reading this issue.