Editorial


 
 

1

Editorial 
 

LETTER FROM THE MANAGING EDITOR 
 

Steven L. MacCall, PhD 
Managing Editor 

 
 

Greetings from the School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS) here at The 
University of Alabama. It has been my honor to contribute to the creation and ongoing 
management of the Online Journal of Rural Nursing and Health Care as the managing 
editor since its inception. As a faculty member at SLIS, I teach a variety of courses, 
including those in health information and librarianship. My research has been focused in 
the area of clinical digital libraries. Our research group is responsible for the creation and 
ongoing maintenance of the RNO Digital Library, which is linked to from the homepage 
of the RNO website. You may also use the following URL: http://ruralnurseorganization-
dl.slis.ua.edu/. This work is in conjunction with Dr. Ana D. Cleveland at the School of 
Library and Information Sciences at the University of North Texas.  

The purpose of this column twofold: to announce a significant milestone for the 
Online Journal of Rural Nursing and Health Care and to solicit feedback concerning the 
features of the Journal.  

First, the milestone: since our last issue of the Journal in Spring 2004 (Volume 4, 
No. 1), we have been accepted for inclusion into the Cumulative Index to Nursing and 
Allied Health Literature (CINAHL). CINAHL, which is the premier database covering 
nursing and allied health, currently indexes more than 1700 journals, of which 536 are 
classified as nursing journals. The availability of our articles through this highly used 
bibliographic tool will enhance the visibility of our authors’ work. Our next step will be 
to examine possibilities for other bibliographic databases.  

Second, I would like to personally invite emails from the readership of the Online 
Journal of Rural Nursing and Health Care concerning its features. We have made an 
attempt to provide a high quality product, including providing convenient access to 
article abstracts and links to MEDLINE abstracts in the bibliographies of each article. We 
are constantly seeking to provide a better reading environment, so all suggestions are 
welcome! My e-mail is smaccall@bama.ua.edu. 

 Online Journal of Rural Nursing and Health Care, vol. 4, no. 2, Fall 2004
 

http://ruralnurseorganization-dl.slis.ua.edu/
http://ruralnurseorganization-dl.slis.ua.edu/
http://www.cinahl.com/cgi-bin/jlookup?cdbysset.dat+Nursing
mailto:smaccall@bama.ua.edu