Guest Editorial Clifford Lynch 
 

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND LIBRARIES | MARCH 2012 3 
 

Congratulations LITA and Information Technology and Libraries. 

Since the early days of the Internet, I’ve been continually struck by the incredible opportunities 
that it offers organizations concerned with the creation, organization, and dissemination of 
knowledge to advance their core missions in new and more effective ways. Libraries and 
librarians were consistently early and aggressive in recognizing, seizing, and advocating for these 
opportunities, though they’ve faced—and continue to face—enormous obstacles ranging from 
copyright laws to the amazing inertia of academic traditions in scholarly communication. Yet the 
library profession has been slow to open up access to the publications of its own professional 
societies, to take advantage of the greater reach and impact that such policies can offer.  

Making these changes is not easy: there are real financial implications that suddenly seem very 
serious when you are a member of a board of directors, charged with a fiduciary duty to your 
association, and you have to push through plans to realign its finances, organizational mission, and 
goals in the new world of networked information. So, as a long-time LITA member, I find it a great 
pleasure to see LITA finally reach this milestone with Information Technology and Libraries (ITAL)  
moving to fully open-access electronic distribution, and I congratulate the LITA leadership for the 
persistence and courage to make this happen. It’s a decision that will, I believe, make the journal 
much more visible, and a more attractive venue for authors; it will also make it easier to use in 
educational settings, and to further the interactions between librarians, information scientists, 
computer scientists, and members of other disciplines. On a broader ALA-wide level, ITAL now 
joins ACRL’s College & Research Libraries as part of the American Library Association’s portfolio of 
open-access journals.  

Supporting ITAL as an open-access journal is a very good reason indeed to be a member of LITA.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Clifford Lynch (clifford@cni.org) is Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information. 
 

mailto:clifford@cni.org