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2007 was an eventful year for ALIA and ALJ played its part in celebrating 70 years of relative cohesion. We published a very special edition covering the September Library History Forum at the State Library of NSW, but we also carried papers on the increasingly digital days ahead. Now our 70th anniversary is behind us and ALJ will continue with what it says on the back cover: supporting the Association's Objects by documenting progress in research and professional practice and stimulating discussion on issues relevant to libraries and librarianship.

What are these issues? Some are perennial and include refining service delivery to suit contemporary consumer preferences, securing funding, fostering training and education, replacing ageing retirees, and continuing to articulate professional standards--to name a few. But to this writer at this time the most pressing issues relate to technology and require constructive engagement if we are to keep faith with our forebears.

Some things are clear: the globalisation of information services; the tsunami of digitisation (1); greater use (2) and even greater commercialisation of the Web (3); the ubiquity of mobile phones (global dial tone) (4) and their transformation into very personal Internet-capable computers; further, stunning, reductions in the prices of computers, storage and displays.

Technology has, once again, changed the way we live. 35 years ago, when the first online information retrieval systems were being developed, the task they addressed was finding information--any information likely to help with decision making. Today there's a flood of information, including torrents of unsubstantiated opinion, and on the Web in particular, risky reliance on relevance as assessed by search engine companies keen to please their advertisers. We've 'progressed' from difficulty in finding reliable information to difficulty in finding reliable information.

In library world we're aware of the irony, and cautious about the value of user generated content in the stateless and wait-less Web domain, but I think we now understand that the future for the Web, whilst of paramount importance to libraries, is not the same as the future for libraries.

   The ease of use of facilities such as online shopping for books and
   recordings, and the equal ease and stimulation provided by social
   networking sites has put pressure on cultural institutions to
   foster similar approaches. Their resources are immense. By virtue
   of their role, they have 'data on an epic scale' ... However much
   of it remains in physical form. It will be continuing digitization
   programmes that bring it to the epic stage from a Web viewpoint.
   (5)

It may be stating the obvious, but most libraries still manage physical collections, and while these are being gradually digitised, more work remains to be done than has been completed. Our users are generating content as well. At present they're mostly sharing it with each other in what is being labelled 'social networking', but Wikipedia (6) and Library Thing (7) and other sites demonstrate that content of permanent value is also being created.

In a recent OCLC international study of trends in Internet activity (8), interviews with U.S. library directors were summarised as follows:

   The experts had many unique perspectives and ideas about the roles
   of social networks and libraries. Yet most also see a frontier that
   is quickly and, likely permanently, changing the landscape of the
   Web. There is not a unified vision of the future. What is coming
   into focus is that librarians are just beginning to experiment with
   networked communities to reach their users. All agree that we have
   learning to do and we should get started and get active. It is
   where our users are living.

We're getting started and getting active here, too. The lead article in this issue is a timely, down-to-earth, practical primer for exploring Web 2.0 capabilities in partnership with library users. Christine Mackenzie's team at Yarra Plenty Regional Library in Victoria have rolled up their sleeves, and they're into it.

ALJ is also our journal of record. Dagmar Schmidmaier, former State Librarian and CEO at the State Library of NSW, writes about the 2002 landmark pay equity case which resulted in greater recognition and higher remuneration for library workers, especially women. This is a story best told from a distance, now that we have seen the substantial flow-on effects from the NSW decision.

Julie Sloan, workforce planner, provides us with a short piece on ... well ... workforce planning. It's an edited transcript of a presentation delivered in August this year, but it makes its points effectively: we need better than anecdotal data for sustainable workforce development; and accountability for workforce planning must rest with senior management.

We also carry a carefully researched, thoughtfully argued, fully refereed paper on overlapping skills between librarians and knowledge managers. Written by Stuart Ferguson, Philip Hider and Anne Lloyd from Charles Sturt University the paper draws attention to the implications for educational institutions, professional development programs, and suggests that ALIA's core professional attributes might benefit from revision.

Gary Gorman and his industrious flotilla of reviewers have produced more items than we have space to reproduce, so, for the most part, I have been able to select on the basis of complementarity with the subjects of the main articles.

Finally: a suggestion for your equal edification and enjoyment. If you want to feel good about our preparedness for the next 70 years, about our ability to mix practice with theory and to plan for our customers, collections and computer systems, and most of all about the calibre of our colleagues, read Libraries in the twenty-first century: charting new directions in information services. It's just out, edited by Stuart Ferguson from Charles Sturt University (ISBN 9781876938437), and its 20 essays are the perfect launch pad for wherever we travel next. Invigorating!

Ian McCallum

January 2008

Notes

(1) Pace, Andrew K. Writing 2007 to memory. In: American Libraries, December 2007, p30. Google is estimated to be scanning 10 million books a year, or 27,000 books per day. See also 'Google to host Terabytes of Open-Source Science Data' http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/01/google-to-provi.html Accessed 19 January 2007.

(2) 'In 2001, 35% of Australian dwellings had access to the Internet ... In 2006, 63% of dwellings had access to the Internet. Australian Bureau of Statistics. Patterns of internet access in Australia, 2006. Catalogue no.8146.0.55.001, November 2007.

(3) Australia's top ten sites, in descending order, are Google Australia, Yahoo, Windows Live, Google, Facebook, YouTube, Myspace, Ebay, Wikipedia and NineMSN. Source: www.alexa.com Accessed 11 January 2008.

(4) According to a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald 'In just a decade, we'll have gone from half the world never having made a telephone call to half the world owning a phone': http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/ ten-things-that-will-change-your-future/2007/12/31/1198949747758.html? page=fullpage Accessed 18 January 2008

(5) Middleton, Michael and Julie Lee. Cultural institutions and Web 2.0. Smart Internet Technology CRC, November 2007, p.31 http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00010808/ Accessed 18 January 2008.

(6) http://www.wikipedia.org

(7) http://www.librarything.com/

(8) OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. Sharing, privacy and trust in our networked world. Dublin, Ohio, 2007. ISBN 1-55653-370-5 Section 6, p.30 http://www.oclc.org/reports/sharing/default.htm Accessed 18 January 2008