A Tale of Two Journals

Library science is a profession that requires continuing education and research, with practitioners always trying to create and share best practices with each other.  As librarians do research and learn, often this results in publications in library science journal.  Each journal has its own focus, goals and content.  It can be helpful when doing one’s own writing and research to know which journals to look in for different topics.  In this blog I will compare and contrast the Journal of Library Administration and Public Library Quarterly.

The Journal of Library Administration organizes itself each issue around a theme that they find current and compelling.  The journal itself describes that it hopes that it “communicates important trends and new ideas in management; provides historical perspectives and future projections; reports on the latest technology; reviews and discusses the evaluation and measurement of performance services; deals with cutting-edge issues in financial management and budgeting.”  Their intended audience is library administrators and managers, “anyone who is in a position of management in the library.”  Their entire published articles are reviewed by the editorial board and peers.  Authors are asked to submit original articles electronically to the journal.  Looking at the topics over the last few years, they are wide ranging.  They sometimes focus on a particular kind of library or others they focus on a particular issue or technological development, such as digital humanities or “building blocks of success.”   I am impressed with both the specificity of the articles and the great number of topics they cover.

Public Library Quarterly is more specific, focusing on topics that are important to public librarians.  They want the journal to be for “leaders-directors, managers, staff, trustees, and friends-who believe that change is imperative if public libraries are to fulfill their service missions in the twenty-first century.”  It puts articles through editorial and peer review as a part of its publication process.  They describe the topics they cover as being “best practices and models to improve service; management case studies-with results and failures; library mythologies that retard individual and institutional development; studies of how to plan results and accomplish desired outcomes; marketing and fund-raising tools that work; budget and financial analysis tools and tips; how new technology works in practice; innovative, high-quality programs for children.”  Looking over their last few issues, this seems to be an accurate summary.  It’s a wide range of topics, but certainly is all about public libraries challenges and experiences.  Their editorial board is mostly made up of public library professionals from across the globe, and a few other people who work for businesses that service libraries.  While the Journal of Library Administration seems to mostly to publish long research articles, Public Library Quarterly in its instructions to potential authors that they also take “news of current public library events, and book reviews covering issues of interest to those in public library work. Surveys that can be developed and used as national benchmarks for such administrative concerns as salaries, usage standards, and budget breakdowns are also published.”

In considering which of these journals would be of particular interest or help to me as a future professional, Public Library Quarterly seems much more useful.  While I am interested in library administration, the Journal of Library Administration always has articles about very particular situations.  I feel like I would need to be a manager in a specific situation, like in a health library or a library with budget problems, so get useful information from a particular issue.  Public Library Quarterly does not have a particular theme for each issue, and so it is much more likely that there would be something for everyone whatever their public library situation is.  It was very interesting to look at the variety of things people are writing about now in both journals.  Usually in searching I’m looking for information on a particular subject and looking at a variety of journals.  It’s a very different practice to look through an academic journal issue by issue.