Can we learn lessons from other libraries? Image from Acción Visual/Diana Arias.
me to seek out the funding that enabled me to visit several of those countries to get a better understanding of how those fitted into the overall pattern of education and employment there.
To begin to get some insight into what might be possible, a starting point could be found close to home, in the sense that CILIP provides members with free online access to Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) and some professional journals from major publishers (
www.cilip.
org.uk/page/ProfessionalJournals). Ebsco produce LISTA, a free online index with coverage of journals in librar- ianship that is slightly different from LISA, for example in covering more of the American magazines produced by State Library Associations and other special interest groups in the USA (https://bit. ly/2MlwyDU)
If someone wants to look beyond the boundaries of librarianship, there are similar ways of finding out what it hap- pening in other disciplines. Even a Google search will bring up references to publica- tions that are attracting a lot of attention. In these days of electronic publishing, the librarianship collections of many ‘library schools’ and other professional publications are locked up behind pub- lishers’ pay walls. Our profession has not been sufficiently aggressive in negotiating licences with publishers to maintain the access to publications that walk-in visitors have usually had to printed material in university libraries. Access to many journals is difficult unless you live near
52 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
the national libraries’ reading rooms. To help you follow up your interests, there are, however, quite a number of other professional journals and magazines that can be found on open access on the Web. There’s no consolidated listing of open access journals in librarianship that I’m aware of (other than the scholarly ones that meet the criteria for inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals), but a search on the web will quickly reveal that the libraries of some universities’ library schools have included many of the others in resource lists for students (e.g. https://
libguides.usask.ca/c.php?g=82013&p=785273). If you do look at open access journals, remember that our discipline is not free from the plague of poor quality and predatory journals which have become an unfortunate feature of open access publish- ing along with questionable organizations that mimic reputable citation indexing services. Many of these are listed by Stop Predatory Journals (https://predatoryjournals. com/). While the quality of the research and writing in many of these is not so good, they can begin to give you an insight into what’s on the ground in particular countries. But you also have to remember that writers of articles, even in many of the ‘quality’ LIS journals, are not neces- sarily very good at explaining the context in which libraries in their country operate and giving you an insight into what adap- tations may be needed to transfer an idea from one country to another.
Adding an international perspective Looking critically at reports on develop-
ments or problems in other countries is a further way of developing as a professional. Libraries operating in wealthier econ- omies or more politically supportive organisations may not have had to think much about any solution to a problem other than throwing money at it but may still have some experience in practice that is worth reviewing objectively. Libraries operating in weaker economies or less supportive contexts have probably been driven to more creative solutions but may have accepted limitations to the changes that they have introduced that need to be understood.
Long-standing British interest in other countries means that LISA has wider coverage of foreign journals than other indexing and abstracting services in our field. You could also become a member of ILIG, CILIP’s International Library and Information Group, which publishes its journal online and also holds regular evening events, usually in London, but often video-recorded for later streaming. Another way of finding out what’s hap- pening around the world is by identifying the special interest groups that exist not only in this country but also elsewhere, as well as those that support academic librarians specialising in the literature of other regions. For example, a lot of the news that I follow comes from the Middle East Librarians Association in the USA. The journals and newsletters published by these groups tend to feature widely among the open access publications in our field. The groups often also circulate news through an email list or blog that
October-November 2019
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