The March 2025 issue of the open-access journal Information Technology and Libraries (ITAL) is now available. This issue contains the following peer-reviewed articles:
“Enhancing Discoverability: Transitioning a Board Game Collection from a LibGuide to a CollectionBuilder Site,” by Hanwen Dong, Perri Moreno, Tyler Rodrigues, and Julia Stone, details a project in which the authors built a custom site for a board game collection using CollectionBuilder.
“The Evolution of Library Automation Systems in Chinese Academic Libraries,” by Guojun Li and Xiaohua Qiu, is an overview of the development history of automation systems in Chinese academic libraries and provides a forward-looking analysis of their future trends.
“Chatbots and Scholarly Databases: Impressions from Trying Out Scopus AI,” by Leticia Antunes Nogueira, explores Scopus AI, which allows users to engage with Scopus in natural language rather than via Boolean operators.
“The 2023 Rhysida Ransomware Attack on the British Library: Prioritisation, Expertise, and Funding Issues,” by Frank Houghton, Michael Winterburn, and Ken Oakley, details what is known about the attack and how such breaches might be prevented in the future.
This issue also has our regular contributed columns:
- From the Field: Weed Your Budget: Visualizing an Academic Library’s Financial Position, by Lydia Harlan, describes the use of business intelligence technology to provide a transformative impact on financial operations of libraries.
- ITAL & … : Open for Who? Reality of Knowledge Access in the Prison Industrial Complex, by sam hidde tripp, discusses shortcomings in access advocacy when it comes to individuals within the prison industrial complex
- Public Libraries Leading the Way: Intergenerationally Accessible Makerspaces: How Carroll County Public Library’s Exploration Commons Serves Our Local Senior Population, by Ian Trawinski, Lisa Picker, and Andrea Berstler, describes how a dedicated makerspace has attracted a surprising user community.
Contributing to the Journal
We invite all readers to contribute to the journal. If you are involved in any aspect of libraries—we consider this an inclusive scope, including cultural memory institutions such as museums, archives, and more—we welcome submissions for peer-reviewed articles or communications. Information Technology and Libraries is proud to be diamond open access — that is, it is free to read for all, charges no article processing fees to authors or their institutions, and content is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Want to know more? See our Call for Submissions. If you have questions or wish to bounce ideas off the editor and assistant editor, please contact either of us at the email addresses below.
Ken Varnum, Editor – varnum@umich.edu
Marisha Kelly, Assistant Editor marisha.librarian@gmail.com
