Editor’s Comments Bob Gerrity 
 

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES | DECEMBER 2012 1 
 

Past and present converge with the December 2012 issue of Information Technology and Libraries 
(ITAL), as we also publish online the first volume of ITAL’s predecessor, the Journal of Library 
Automation (JOLA), originally published in print in 1968.  

 

The first volume of JOLA offers a fascinating glimpse into early days of library automation, when 
many things were different, such as the size (big) and capacity (small) of computer hardware, and 
many things were the same (e.g., Richard Johnson’s description of the book catalog project at 
Stanford, where “the major achievement of the preliminary systems design was to establish a 
meaningful dialogue between the librarian and systems and computer personnel.” Plus ça change, 
plus c'est la meme.  

There are articles by luminaries in the field: Richard de Gennaro describes approaches to 
developing an automation program in a large research library, Frederick Kilgour, from the Ohio 

 

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

http://ejournals.bc.edu/ojs/index.php/ital/issue/view/312


 

Editor’s Comments Bob Gerrity 
 

 

EDITOR’S COMMENTS | GERRITY  2 
 

College Library Center (now OCLC), analyzes catalog-card production costs at Columbia, Harvard, 
and Yale in the mid 1960s (8.8 to 9.8 cents per completed card), and Henriette Avram from the 
Library of Congress describes the successful use of the COBOL programming language to 
manipulate MARC II records. 

The December 2012 issue marks the completion of ITAL’s first year as an e-only, open-access 
publication. While we don’t have readership statistics for the previous print journal to compare 
with, download statistics for the e-version appear healthy, with more than 30,000 full-text article 
downloads for 2012 content so far this year, plus more than 10,000 downloads for content from 
previous years. Based on the download statistics, the topics of most interest to today’s ITAL 
readers are discovery systems, web-based research guides, digital preservation, and digital 
copyright.     

This month’s issue takes some of these themes further, with articles that examine the usability of 
autocompletion features in library search interfaces (Ward, Hahn, and Feist), reveal patterns of 
student use of library computers (Thompson), propose a cloud-based digital library storage 
solution (Sosa-Sosa), and summarize attributes of open standard file formats (Park, Oh).  

Happy reading.