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Virginia Libraries

Current editors:
Beth DeFrancis defrancb@georgetown.edu, Editor
John Connolly jconnolly@nsl.org, Assistant Editor

April/May/June, 2011
Volume 57, Number 2

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Openers

by Lyn C. A. Gardner and Cy Dillon

We challenge you to share your experiences with subscribers to this publication and the world at large.

With the soaring popularity of e-books, and the ever-expanding depth and scope of digital collections, the editors of Virginia Libraries would like to announce our next theme: electronic collections, resources, and access. Between the two of us we have, in the course of the past year, added new e-book collections and solved problems such as linking to titles through proxy servers; added individual electronic monographs to our collections; purchased and developed circulation policies for e-readers or begun to explore doing so; begun to investigate reinstating Overdrive for both e-texts and e-audio now that the time has come; bought our first texts strictly for e-readers; added mobile device access for e-content; negotiated contracts to digitize library materials for the Internet Archive; investigated repository software and storage providers with intentions of becoming a publishing library; continued to enhance bibliographic records specifically for improved keyword access; scanned an entire collection of literary papers to aid in collocating texts as literary executor; published poems and stories in electronic format; used electronic platforms to participate in literary workshops with writers from across the country; and more. While many of us in the Virginia library community are participating in these activities, few of them are documented in our pages. We challenge you to share your experiences with subscribers to this publication and the world at large. Our electronic version (http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/VALib/), hosted by Virginia Tech’s Digital Library and Archives, is another good example of the power of digital publishing, receiving hundreds of thousands of hits annually from around the globe.

With a submission deadline of November 1, we hope to recruit articles on a wide variety of topics: e-books and e-readers; digitization of special and historical collections; interesting solutions for online catalogs, collections, and projects; new web and social media techniques; problems and solutions in serving up electronic content — the possibilities are virtually endless. We would, of course, welcome interviews with key players in the field, as well as collaborative efforts with digital repositories or projects that you admire. We’re looking for tips on how to add e-readers to one’s collection, as well as forecasts about exciting developments such as Amazon’s promise to make it possible to check out library e-books on personal Kindles, the newly announced Playaway View, and the many possibilities offered by QR codes.

On an unrelated note, we’d also like to offer our sincere apologies to Sarah Hand Meacham for the misspelling of her name that occurred in the review of her book, Every Home a Distillery: Alcohol, Gender, and Technology in the Colonial Chesapeake, in Virginia Libraries 56.2. Her name has been corrected in the online archives (http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/VALib/v56_n2/). While the editors do not intend to revisit past issues once they are archived under normal circumstances, particularly avoiding any changes aimed at altering past content or style, in this case we felt that the correct form of the author’s name takes on greater significance in an online environment, in which a mistake persists and continues to affect one’s ability to retrieve desired information via a variety of search techniques. VL


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