Editorial Review

cadre of referees begin their second, and final, three-year term of service. During our first term, 2008 to 2011, we brought you five or six articles and an equal number of book reviews every other month. We hope you as readers found them enlightening on a wide variety of academic library topics. We culled the many manuscripts we received for consideration to select, through the peer review process, the best research and writing submitted. Our acceptance statistics with manuscripts are fairly consistent year to year: we receive about one hundred manuscripts for consideration and from these we select thirty for publication. My experience as editor of our journal for the last three years has only reinforced my commitment to the blind peer review process we follow in selecting manuscripts for publication. Our review process, similar to that of other peer review scholarly journals, works like this: step one, manuscript (without author information) screened by an editorial assistant for worthiness of peer review; step two, manuscript (without author information) reviewed by two or more referees; and step three, editor makes final decision based on peer reviews and own evaluation. This process takes two to three months to complete. While no process like this is perfect, peer review, in my opinion, comes close in its unbiased and careful critique of writing and research results. Usually there is consensus among the referees and the editor in our first rounds of evaluation; when there is not, I seek more independent reviews until I see a clear pattern of evaluation emerge. Any credit for the value of our journal must, of course, go first to the authors Editorial Review of our articles. It is their insights , found through their research and expressed in their good writing, that make our journal worthwhile. We appreciate the time, effort, concentration, creativity, and persistence demanded of our authors. Most of our manuscripts go through one or more revisions before being finally accepted for publication. Our referees deserve a great deal of credit too. We have a cadre of ninety experienced academic librarian writers and researchers with their own excellent publication records who volunteer their time to act as impartial evaluators of our manuscript submissions. Referees are the anonymous, unsung heroes of the scholarly communications process. I am continually impressed by the quality of their rigorous reviews and their thoughtful and constructive comments and judgments. As much as possible …