Editorial

This issue of LRTS is meaningful to me in numerous ways. First, it contains five research papers. It has been unusual during my tenure as LRTS Editor to publish this many research papers in an issue. I typically have two to three and often an equal number of “Notes on Operations” papers.

Additionally, many of the research papers in this issue were submitted to the editorial system previously used for LRTS (the submission management system was switched in May 2018). The transition between systems was not particularly smooth. I am grateful to the authors who were affected by this change for their patience and understanding. The variety of subjects reflected in these papers, ranging from book conservation to article-level discovery to acquisitions and RDA adoption and implementation in public libraries, is impressive. Technical services work is complex and varied and provides the foundation for effective library operations overall. It is often overlooked as it proceeds seamlessly when effective processes are in place. However, the path to those processes typically involves trial and error, and sometimes failure, which is a critical part of problem solving.

As libraries acquire and make available an increasing number of electronic resources (e-resources), there is a growing need to preserve older and fragile materials, many of which are not available electronically or are too fragile to possibly digitize. I participated in a planning discussion with colleagues and was surprised that e-resources were described as providing instant access. The planning, negotiation, and constant monitoring of e-resources is time consuming and constant. Accessing e-books is not always straightforward as there might be proxy issues and usage restrictions. Acquiring them is a challenge with different vendor platforms, digital rights, and purchasing models.

Introducing new resource description standards, particularly RDA, is expensive, time consuming, and challenging. Part of the struggle involves acceptance and buy in, and a commitment. There are instances when implementation of a new standard or changes are not executed because an institution lacks funding or staffing, or there is a belief that the existing standards and procedures are acceptable. This can be a conscious choice as there are institutions where catalogers apply both AACR2 and RDA, others that have chosen to implement RDA but include AACR2 practices in their procedures and workflows, and still others who might not be supported by their administration.

The acquisition of e-books and RDA implementation are two of the topics in this issue:

• In “A Comparison of Standard Practice Treatments in Research Library Book Conservation, 2007 to 2017,” Whitney S. Baker reports on the findings of a ten-year follow-up survey conducted in 2017 to determine whether and how book conservation practices have changed over the last ten years.
• Aruna P. Magier addresses the role of foreign language journals as important components of interdisciplinary area studies collections at research libraries in her paper “Creating Article-Level Discovery of Print-Only Foreign Language Journals: A Case Study of SALToC’s Distributed Approach.” Her paper discusses SALToC, the South Asian Language Journals Cooperative Table of Contents project, which creates online, centrally browsable open access tables of contents to enable shared access to print-only foreign language journals that are not typically included in online abstracting and indexing services.
• How and to what extent RDA has been implemented in US public libraries is the topic of “Resource Description and Access Adoption and Implementation in Public Libraries in the United States,” by Roman S. Panchyshyn, Frank P. Lambert, and Sevim McCutcheon. The authors used survey methodology to focus on collecting data on variables that include geographic location, educational level, training history and needs, library size, and budget.
• Maria Savova and Jason S. Price define four key facets of a materials budget that has been optimized for the e-resources environment and describe a process that can be used to redesign any academic library budget structure for electronic purchases. Their paper “Redesigning the Academic Library Materials Budget for the Digital Age: Applying the Power of Faceted Classification to Acquisitions Fund Management” includes specific examples of important practical advantages that have accrued at their institution since a full-faceted materials budget was implemented.
• “E-book Use over Time and across Vendors in an Interdisciplinary Field,” by Daniel Tracy, presents an analysis of e-book usage in an interdisciplinary research collection for library and information science (LIS). This study demonstrates the usage of LIS e-books as an exemplary interdisciplinary collection, and how to develop options for analyses of e-book collections that maximize the utility of usage reports.
• Ronald M. Lewis and Marie R. Kennedy’s paper “The Big Picture: A Holistic View of E-book Acquisitions,” describes how the merging of two departments at their library provided an opportunity to rethink workflows and identified e-book acquisitions as a critical task to review. Process mapping was used to show the complexity of different work being performed in their department and offered staff a visual mechanism to see how their work fit into a sequence of actions as part of a larger workflow.
• Book reviews by Book Review Editor Elyssa Gould for your professional reading and enrichment.