INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF LIBRARIANSHIP, 2(2), 1-2 

ISSN:2474-3542 

 

Editorial: Celebrating One Year Anniversary and Introducing the 

Third Issue 

It has been one year since the launch of the inaugural issue in December 2016. Since then, IJoL 

has published two issues and 18 articles covering a wide range of topics, such as data librarianship, 

academic library services, services in public libraries and innovative technology. IJoL has become 

an effective venue for librarians, professors and other professionals in Library and Information 

Science (LIS) to communicate their original research, practices, reviews, opinions and other 

reports. Authors and other contributors from all over the world, including Canada, China, Finland, 

South Africa, the UK and the US, have made IJoL a real international publication. In October 2017, 

the Library of Congress started to archive IJoL permanently. This ensures that all intellectual work 

published in IJoL from the beginning will be preserved for generations to see. 

Now we are proud to publish our third issue. In this issue: 

Zhang et al. investigated five LIS schools to reveal the current state and development of 

data science education in China. They also did a case study on another institution, Fudan 

University to obtain further information and insights on this topic.  

What is the role of the Chinese American librarians in LIS diversity in the 21st century? 

Ruan and Liu aim to answer this question through a national survey of Chinese American 

Librarians Association (CALA) members followed by semi-structured interviews of selected 

survey participants. The findings of this study have contributed to CALA’s strategic planning and 

other initiatives. 

Li reports the “Database Center of the Yi Culture” project for the preservation of the culture 

of Yi People, the sixth largest ethnic group in China. This article details the background, values, 

plans and achievements of the project as well as the challenges of building such a database. 

International students have often been defined in library literature as a special population 

with cultural backgrounds or languages differing from their host countries. Bordonaro conducted 

a preliminary research on the library use and perceptions of cross-border students enrolled in a 

binational joint degree program offered by Brock University in Canada and the State University 

of New York at Buffalo in the US. This study suggests that cross-border students be considered 

international students, and that cross-border university library settings be a viable topic of study 

for librarianship. 

And in our last featured article, Wu and Yang explored the possible patterns of time-to-

acceptance for refereed articles in LIS publications. Through an examination on all 85 ISI-indexed 

LIS journals, the authors identified 17 journals with valid data online and developed their 

estimation models of time-to-acceptance.    



Liu / International Journal of Librarianship 2(2) 2 

In the column entitled “Reports from the Field”, Xu shares how the Lafayette College 

Library in the US uses internal grants to integrate information literacy into upper-level courses. In 

another article, Xu and Chen present their approaches to address an email notification issue in 

Aleph, one of the most adopted integrated library systems.  

Another column returning in this issue is “LIS Education Around the World”. In Part II of 

the directory, Ren continues to outline the LIS education accreditation processes across the world, 

including Ireland, Germany, and South Africa. 

This issue also includes two book reviews of publications in data analytics in the library 

and reports on two international conferences in China.  

Lastly, I would like to express my gratitude to all editors, peer reviewers and authors who 

have made significant contributions to this issue.   

 

 

Guoying Liu 

University of Windsor