December Editorial

Much of the study of, and discourse around, galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs) has traditionally focused on cognitive processes of users of these institutions. This special issue of the Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association (JALIA) on ‘Serving the Whole Person in GLAMs’ guest edited by Drs Noah Lenstra and Kiersten Latham seeks to bring together papers focused more about how these institutions serve the whole person. Their guest editorial and the papers themselves will explore more about the concept of serving the whole person in GLAMS but we would like to briefly introduce our guest editors.

Dr Kiersten F. Latham is the Director of Arts & Cultural Management and Museum Studies, as well as Associate Professor in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design at Michigan State University. Prior to this, Dr Latham spent nine years at Kent State University where she developed and taught in the museum studies specialisation within the Master’s in Library & Information Science and ran the experimental MuseLab. She has taught all aspects of Museum Studies, from administration to collections management to user experience. In addition to academic work, she has worked in, on, and about museums in various capacities for over 30 years, serving as a director, educator, researcher, collections manager, curator, volunteer, and consultant. Her research interests convene around the meaning of museum objects – especially with respect to emotion, perception, sensation, and spirituality – and the conceptual foundations of museums as document systems. She has done research on numinous experiences with museum objects, imaginative touch (of museum objects), user perceptions of ‘the real thing’ in museums, museums as ecological systems, contemplative practices in museums, positive museology, and conceptual ramifications of museum object as document.

Dr Noah Lenstra is Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. His research focuses on programs and partnerships in the public library sector, particularly as they involve health & wellness, digital inclusion, ageing issues, and cultural heritage. Recent publications include: ‘Food Justice in the Public Library: Information, Resources, and Meals’ (2019, w/Christine D’Arpa), ‘Library services to an aging population: A nation-wide study in the United States’ (2019, w/Fatih Oguz & Courtnay S. Duvall), ‘Examining libraries as public sphere institutions: Mapping questions, methods, theories, findings, and research gaps’ (2019, w/Andreas Vårheim & Roswitha Skare), and ‘Public Libraries and Walkable Neighborhoods’ (2019, w/Jenny Carlos). He is the author of the forthcoming book Healthy Living at the Library (2020, Libraries Unlimited), and in July 2019 received (with colleagues from Wayne State University and the University of Oklahoma) a three-year grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to study ‘How do small and rural public libraries address health and wellness through public programs?’ He is a member of the Public Library Association’s Promoting Healthy Communities Advisory Group. His research on these topics has been published in numerous scholarly articles, and he blogs monthly on the topic of programs and partnerships for the American Library Association’s Public Programs Office. Lenstra is an Affiliated Faculty Member in the UNCG Gerontology Department, and has worked with the National Institute on Ageing’s Go4Life campaign for the past two years. In 2016 he founded, and continues to direct, the Let’s Move in Libraries initiative. He met Dr Kiersten F. Latham in Summer 2017 during a meeting of ‘LAMCOM – Libraries, archives, and museums in the community’, a research group based out of the Arctic University of Norway, in which both Latham and Lenstra participate (https://en.uit.no/forskning/forskningsgrupper/gruppe?p_document_id=53472)

As is evident, they are both well placed to edit an issue on this particular topic and we at JALIA are very grateful to them for their work in bringing together this collection. Thank you, Noah and Kiersten!

The issue finishes strongly with seventeen book reviews, and we hope you find all of them very informative and useful.

As this issue is the final one for 2019, we the Editorial team wish all our readers, authors, peer and book reviewers a happy new year for 2020. To our authors, peer and book reviewers, we acknowledge that the journal would not exist without your work and we are very grateful to you. We look forward to your continuing association with the Journal into the future.