HEP Libraries Webzine: Call of Interest

[Corrado Pettenati]

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HEP Libraries Webzine: Call of Interest

Why another electronic journal? you may ask. Well, we thought it might be
fun to get together electronically (physically is out of the question for
most of us) to discuss our everyday experience in the delivery of services
to our users.

In librarianship alone there are many electronic journals: Some are devoted
to librarianship in general; some to librarianship in a particular field or
country or type of library; others have a slant towards research in
information science. However, to our knowledge, there is not one devoted to
high-energy physics libraries. Some of the problems we confront are unique
to our field, others are of a more general nature. We are interested in
knowing about effective and useful solutions to problems (and the
problems), based on your experience.

If you wish to contribute to our new Webzine, here is our list of general
subject categories, a first list of articles, and our  "Manifesto". As you
can see there is a wide choice.

Information management

Purchasing, cataloguing, document preservation/archiving, Interlibrary
Loans (ILL), quality control, user surveys, user education, copyright,
electronic journals and their management, reference services (on-site and
remote), grey literature management.

Resources

Reference tools, databases, websites, discussion lists, collection
development, budgets, human resources, space.

Training

Staff training, professional development, distance learning.

Articles in preparation for our first number:

 Jean-Yves Le Meur (CERN)    International Conference on Grey Literature
(Washington, 4-5 October 1999).

Gilda Leoni (CERN)    Electronic Publishing in Physics Workshop (Geneva,
March 2000).

Marino Miculan (SISSA, Trieste)    General description of The Journal of
High Energy Physics (JHEP) the  electronic journal.

Susanna Mornati (Phys. Dept., Milan Univ.)    Experience in small and large
hep libraries.

Jens Vigen (CERN)    Link managers for grey literature.

If you are prepared to help with our discussions, please get out your
preferred scribbling tool and start writing now. The deadline for articles
for the first issue is 15 December 1999. We hope to put up the first issue
in February 2000. If we are successful, we hope to put out two issues per
year.

If you are interested in writing an article (the length is up to you),
please send an informative abstract ( approximately  150 words) to
hep-webzine-editors at listbox.cern.ch Later you will receive information
about our submission procedure and (simple) templates (Word, HTML, plain
ASCII).

We are also interested in receiving news items, information on forthcoming
events, Web resources you may have discovered, reviews, conference reports,
specialized discussion lists, (and whatever else we may have forgotten).

Manifesto

Welcome to the HEP Libraries Webzine. Whether you work in a large HEP
centre such as CERN, DESY, FERMILAB, KEK, LANL, LBL or SLAC or a smaller
national lab or university physics department or HEP group, you are serving
the same community of users and you have similar problems of information
gathering and distribution.

You may have a lot of help from someone in a  computer group, or just
minimal help, or even none at all. You may  have a speciality in a larger
group or you may have to do everything yourself. We hope that, despite all
these disparities of working conditions and resources, the articles and
news items in this Webzine will be a help and an encouragement for you to
keep on providing services amidst the current upheavals in the information
world.

How can our services be effective? Are they effective? Are our users happy
with the services we provide? Can we ensure seamless access to resources,
that Holy Grail of the information era?

The world of librarianship is changing very quickly, thanks in part to the
Web. Remember, it was invented by and for high-energy physicists (with a
bit of help from some friends).

The new librarian (that means you), and the old one too, has many talents.
You are above all an information manager, in all the meanings of that term.
You are also a Net navigator, Web page designer, IT gatekeeper, information
consultant, and educator.

Frightening isn't it? Like Monsieur Jourdain we do all speak prose
nevertheless.

Talking about what librarians do was the easy part. Getting them to write
about it and discuss problems and, above all, solutions may be a little bit
more difficult. We hope that you will help us with that. This journal aims
to help you in your daily activities by discussing the problems confronting
us all  in the delivery of our services. We hope it  provides you with
information towards that goal.

Joint Editors: Gilda Leoni and Susan Leech O'Neale.

Editorial Board: LIST

Susan Leech O' Neel (CERN, Switzerland) <Susan.Leech.O'Neale at cern.ch>
Gilda Leoni (CERN, Switzerland)  <Gilda.Leoni at cern.ch>
Jean-Yves Le Meur (CERN, Switzerland) <Jean-Yves.Le.Meur at cern.ch>
Susanna Mornati (Univ. of Milan  Physics Dept.,Italy)
<Susanna.Mornati at mi.infn.it>
Carmen O'Dell (CERN, Switzerland) <Carmen.O'Dell at cern.ch>
Corrado Pettenati (CERN, Switzerland) <Corrado.Pettenati at cern.ch>
Cornelia Schumacher (Bern University Science Library, Switzerland)
<schumacher at bewi.unibe.ch>
Stella Seddon (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, England) <S.Seddon at rl.ac.uk>
Sara Tompson (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, USA) <sarat at fnal.gov>