Editor’s Comments Bob Gerrity 
 

 

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES | SEPTEMBER 2012  1 

G’day, mates, and welcome to our third open-access issue. ITAL takes on an additional 
international dimension with this issue, as your faithful editor has taken up residence Down 
Under, in sunny Queensland, Australia. 

The recent ALA Annual Meeting in Anaheim marked some changes to the ITAL Editorial Board that 
I’d like to highlight. Cynthia Porter and Judith Carter are ending their tenure with ITAL after many 
years of service. Cynthia is featured in this month’s Editorial Board Thoughts column, offering her 
perspective on library technology past and present. Judith Carter ends a long run with ITAL as 
Managing Editor, and I thank her for her years of dedicated service. Ed Tallent, Director of Levin 
Library at Curry College, is the incoming Managing Editor. We also welcome two new members of 
the Editorial Board: Brad Eden, the Dean of Library Services and Professor of Library Science at 
Valparaiso University, and Jerome Yavarkovsky, former University Librarian at Boston College, 
and the 2004 recipient of ALA’s Hugh C. Atkinson Award. Jerome currently co-chairs the Library 
Technology Working Group at The MediaGrid Immersive Education Initiative. 

We cover a broad range of topics in this issue. Ian Chan, Pearl Ly, and Yvonne Meulemans describe 
the implementation of the open-source instant messaging (IM) network Openfire at  California 
State University San Marcos, in supporting of the integration of chat reference and internal library 
communications. Richard Gartner explores the use of the Metadata Encoding and Transmission 
Standard (METS) as an alternative to the Fedora Content Model (FCM) for an “intermediary” 
digital-library schema. Emily Morton and Karen Hanson present an innovative approach to 
creating a management dashboard of key library statistics. Kate Pittsley and Sara Memmott 
describe navigational improvements made to LibGuides at Eastern Michigan University. Bojana 
Surla reports on the development of a platform-independent, Java-based MARC editor. Yongming 
Wang and Trevor Dawes delve into the need for next-generation integrated library systems and 
early initiatives in that space. Melanie Schlosser and Brian Stamper begin to explore the effects of 
reposting library digital collections on Flickr. 

In addition to the compelling new content in this issue of ITAL, we have compelling old content 
from the print archive of ITAL and its predecessor, Journal of Library Automation (JOLA), that will 
soon be available online, thanks in large to the work of Andy Boze and colleagues at the University 
of Notre Dame. Scans of all of the back issues have now been deposited onto the server that 
currently hosts ITAL, and will be processed and published online over the coming months. 

 
Bob Gerrity (r.gerrity@uq.edu.au) is University Librarian, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, 
Queensland, Australia.