Publication analysis
About the publication
Title: The Journal of Creative Library Practice
ISSN: 2330-42271
Website: http://creativelibrarypractice.org/
Purpose, objective, or mission: From the website’s About page: “The Journal of Creative Library Practice provides 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.”2
Target audience: “This journal reaches librarians and information professionals of all types, including academic, public, school, special, medical, legal, and others.” The journal is working to broaden its readership to individuals outside the profession, to anyone interested in creative solutions to LIS issues; or anyone who wants to participate in discussions about creative issues and solutions.3
Publisher: Published as an online blog-format journal by Creative Library Practice4
Peer reviewed? Yes,5 though this blog-style journal also publishes non-peer reviewed content. The refereed articles are distinguished from the blog posts on the site.6
Type: LIS scholarly and professional7
Medium: Online,8 peer-reviewed blogposts9
Content: Posts on creative solutions to LIS issues.10
Frequency of publication: This online journal is updated as frequently as the editors write posts and peer-reviewed articles are accepted.11
About the publication’s submission guidelines
Location of submission guidelines: http://creativelibrarypractice.org/instructions-for-authors/
Types of contributions accepted: Any article focusing on creative solutions to LIS issues, including communications barriers, technology issues, reviews of relevant books or websites.12
Submission and review process: The website provides a link to email manuscripts in MS-Word .doc, .docx, or RTF format.13
Editorial tone: Editor Joseph Kraus, in a Q&A with Library Journal, stated, “We want to encourage prospective authors to write with less formal rhetoric.”14
Style guide used: References should be provided in a consistent format, whether Chicago, Turabian, MLA, or APA, or author may simply provide links to cited material.15
Conclusion: Evaluation of publication’s potential for LIS authors
The journal’s editors consider the publication to be an open source alternative to the stodgy print publications usually favored by the LIS community. They are a creative group open to all sorts of submissions, so this would be a great place to expand on an LIS student paper or thesis, or write about a creative approach tried at a library-related job, and how it helped the organization.
Audience analysis
About the publication’s readers
Publication circulation: Statistics are not available, but as this journal is also an informal blog there is potential to reach a large audience.
Audience location and language or cultural considerations: The journal is online and the editors are LIS professionals at colleges and universities around the United States.16 The journal is written in American English.17
Reader characteristics: This journal appeals to forward thinking, creative, multidisciplined, against-the-grain LIS professionals seeking to share information with like-minded peers. The journal is written for and by LIS professionals in all possible settings, including academic, public, school, special, medical, and law libraries. It also aims to reach those readers who are interested in libraries but not necessarily working in them, including teachers, parents, students, and businesses.18
The journal was created by LIS professionals who wish to have a truly open access information sharing site that features creative solutions to common problems in information organizations. This is an open minded, nontraditional group that sees the value in current technologies and is working to take advantage of anything that can help the library community achieve its goals. The journal leans toward the informal, so potential authors should keep this in mind while writing for the publication. The goal is to provide articles from a variety of perspectives.19
Knowledge of LIS subject matter: The knowledge level is probably quite high, but as the editors are attempting to appeal to laypeople as well as LIS students and professionals, potential authors should keep the jargon to a minimum and avoid highly technical terms and unusual acronyms.20
Conclusion: Analysis of reader characteristics and their potential impact on authors
The Journal of Creative Library Practice is part of a new LIS journal standard: using open access for peer-reviewed articles under Creative Commons licensing, and providing relatively loose guidelines in terms of content, and even citations.
Last updated: May 14, 2017
Comments are closed.