Bookish Librarians

Our journal is mostly about articles. We consider around a hundred article manuscripts a year, and from those submissions , we select about thirty—we hope the best—for publication. These peer reviewed articles, running 3,000 to 6,000 words in length, usually report the research results of a focused study on a particular process, procedure, or policy stance in academic librarianship. In this current issue, for example, you will find interesting and useful reports on assessing library scholarship, corporate annual report collections, the impact of library training on graduate student performance, proficiencies for instruction librarians, who are " authorized users " in electronic resource licenses, and library applications for mobile devices. These types of articles are our main business, and their like make up the bulk of scholarly communications in the social sciences and even more so in the sciences. How often these articles are cited, as measured by citation indexes, can make or break the reputation of a researcher or a journal. Our journal, thanks to its influential articles, has one of the higher citation " impact factors " in the field of librarian-ship. You can read most articles quickly in one " sitting. " While journal articles occupy most of our pages, I want to remind readers that we do book reviews too. Ably managed by our book review editor, Geoffrey D. Smith, who by day is the Head of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at the Ohio State University, this section at the end of each issue offers five to six cogent reviews on a variety of new books in librarianship, publishing history, and information science. In this issue you will find reviews on books about book selling since the fifteen century, mistakes in library management (one we should all read), book makers (the legitimate Bookish Librarians kind), jazz, and magic. Writing a concise and insightful book review is not easy, and I thank Dr. Smith and his book reviewers for their good efforts. Most of the letters to the editor I receive, and I do not get many, are in response to book reviews. An author or a publisher takes exception to a comment made by a reviewer. I am glad to get these, for they show someone is carefully reading, and sensitive about, what we write. I like reading book reviews. Maybe it is a throwback to my days as a bibliog-rapher, my favorite job in …