Editorial

Libraries for Nursing Bulletin volume 34 (3/4) pp 67-68

Welcome to the final issue of LfN Bulletin for 2014, and what is, in some ways, the closing of a chapter. You may have noticed that this issue, which under normal circumstances would have come out before Christmas, has instead reached you in early 2015, after the decorations have come down and the Lang Synes have been Aulded. The reason for this is that Libraries for Nursing has been in something of a state of flux during the latter half of 2014, with significant changes to the way we will be moving forward in the future. LfN’s outgoing chair, Lorrie Farrall, goes into these changes in more detail in this issue’s first article.

Attending a conference is an important part of the professional development of any profession, and our profession is no different. The opportunity to see how other people and institutions do things, and perhaps even apply solutions to problems you have been wrestling with, plus the chance to meet new people and build relationships and networks, is not to be turned down lightly. That the conference may be in foreign climes is an added attraction. Sarah Kevill here reports back on her attendance at the World Library and Information Congress, held in Lyon in August 2014.

When it comes to reporting back from conferences and events, there is always the danger that you might have missed something; you’re concentrating on the speaker, but so is everyone else, and they may have an equally interesting take on what is being said, which they may well be tweeting. A resource such as Storify allows you to bring together posts from Twitter and other social media platforms, and combine them together with your own text to give a much broader flavour of an event than simply using your own notes. Phillip Barlow here describes Storify’s use.

Finally, two of LfN’s former committee members, Maurice Wakeham and Jane Shelley, have written a brief history of LfN in all its forms since it came into being in 1980.

This will be the final printed issue, and the final issue of this publication under its current name. As Libraries for Nursing is changing, so the Bulletin is changing too. The next issue, due at Easter, will be the first e-only issue – indeed, it will be the first time that the Bulletin has been published electronically at all. To go with its new format, it will also have a new name – HLG Nursing Bulletin. However, we will continue our aim to offer the same breadth of interesting articles on all manner of topics of concern to librarians that support nursing, midwifery and allied health, as well as providing an avenue for those professionals that are looking to write for publication for the first time. To that end, if you have an idea for an article, whether it’s on a new resource that you’ve come across, an interesting book you’d like to review, a new procedure that you have devised, or anything that you think will be useful, then get in touch with the editor. This is merely the closing of one chapter…it is not the end, or even the beginning of the end; it is merely the end of the beginning.

Phillip Barlow

LfN Bulletin editor