D-Lib Magazine
June 1999Volume 5 Number 6
ISSN 1082-9873Editorial
What's in D-Lib Magazine?
The articles, clippings, pointers, book-reviews, project briefings and commentaries in D-Lib Magazine come from many sources. The editors solicit some, friends send some to us, and some arrive unexpectedly from sources around the world. We are continually looking for help in ensuring that the overall balance reflects the most important developments in digital libraries and electronic publishing.
When D-Lib Magazine was new, every article was by invitation. Sometimes we approached individuals and invited an article on their work. At other times we knew that a particular topic was important and asked around to find the right expert to write about it. In those days, four years ago, the field was small enough that a few individuals could hope to know of most activities. Our goal was to cover all the major areas at least once a year.
As the community working in digital libraries has grown, we no longer know all the creative activities. In the United States and Europe the big well-funded projects get widespread publicity. They continue to be important -- and D-Lib continues to report on them -- but they represent an ever-smaller fraction of the field. D-Lib needs to spread its net.
Today, we still solicit individual articles, but we rely much more on information that comes to us. D-Lib receives few formal letters to the editor, but many informal ones. Some of the most useful suggest topics that deserve more attention, or mention research teams whose work deserves to be better known. Usage statistics show that the Clips and Pointers section is heavily read. Most of this information comes to us. Friends send us pointers; organizers of meetings ask us to publish an announcement or a summary of a report.
The overall objective of D-Lib Magazine is to help digital libraries be a broad interdisciplinary field, not a set of specialties that know little of each other. We invite all our readers to contribute to this shared understanding. Specialist research should be published where the specialists will read it, but when you want a broader community to know about your accomplishments, contact us. If there are important areas that should have more attention, let us know. We have one bias: we like to report on work when it has been completed, not on projects as they are just beginning. Beyond that our criteria are simple. Where is there innovative work that deserves to be widely known?
William Y. Arms
Editor in Chief
Copyright (c) 1999 Corporation for National Research Initiatives
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DOI: 10.1045/june99-editorial