Do you or your team have a creative technical solution to a problem, creative social solution, or creative policy solutions to a problem? Do you have any creative fundraising ideas? Can you make amazing creative signage for your library? Have you creatively designed a website? Did you employ out of the box thinking? What worked, and what didn’t work? The new Open Access Journal of Creative Library Practice will provide an outlet for librarians and information professionals to describe and encourage greater creativity in library and information center communications, policies, collections, instruction, and other areas of librarianship.
This journal intends to reach librarians and information professionals of all types, including academic, public, school, special, medical, legal, and others. We would also like to reach out to readers interested in libraries as well as those interesting in critical information studies. Other readers may include teachers, parents, business people or college students. If a reader is interested in learning more about the creative use of technologies, policies or services to enhance the exchange of information from one person to another (or from one computer to another), then they may be interested in this journal.
The editors would like to publish articles of many different types, including regular contributed scholarly (peer-reviewed) articles, book reviews, technology item reviews, conference reports, opinion pieces, technical reports and more. This content will demonstrate how the person used a creative practice to solve a problem within a library or information center. We welcome articles on teaching and learning in libraries, articles on the cultural meaning of libraries, and research and theory that can inform creative library practice.
Mission, Aims and Goals
The ability to publish nimbly and be accessible to all is a fundamental part of what we’re trying to do. We also want to explore pre- and post-publication peer review and see how reader and site-member comments will contribute to the publication. Finally, we hope to bridge the formal (and too often stuffy) discourse found in the peer-reviewed literature. We also want to provide a space where authors can benefit from the peer review process and the trust readers put in it while employing more playful and informal rhetoric that has developed online. We began to discuss this project in an online community that has an irreverent view of librarianship. We hope to inject into this publication the same irreverent seriousness, creativity, and fun of the community where the idea first bubbled up.
Our profession and this editorial board in particular has a strong interest in being involved in new publishing platforms; as a practical matter, the editorial team sees publishing this journal would be itself a creative library practice.