Content area
As mentioned in the March issue's Letter from the Editors, this is the last issue of the journal with Marisha Kelly on the masthead as Assistant Editor. The journal's first Assistant Editor, Marisha has been a reliable and collegial partner in managing the journal's content, peer review, production, and communications since 2022. I am grateful to her for all she's done to strengthen ITAL as a journal and improve our editorial workflows.
At the same time, I'm excited to welcome Joanna DiPasquale as ITAL's new Assistant Editor. Joanna is the Director of Content and Digital Library Systems at Union College (New York) and has more than 25 years' experience in academic library technology and management. In her current role, she oversees the acquisitions, cataloging/metadata, collection development, digital repository, digital scholarship, and systems areas of Schaffer Library. Having served on the Editorial Board since 2023, she has a solid understanding of the journal's operations and will bring a broad library technology perspective to the journal.
IN THIS ISSUE
The June 2025 issue contains the following peer-reviewed articles:
* Leveraging Innovative Technologies for Improved Library Practices in the Digital Era: The Nigerian Perspective (Rebecca Chidimma Ojobor, Victoria N. Okafor, and Richard N Ugwuanyi) highlights the challenges and opportunities of libraries in a developing country.
* Simplifying and Enhancing Access to Full-Text Articles with LibKey Discovery (Jessie London, Barbara McArthur, Kimberly Vardeman, and Cynthia L. Henry) discusses the implementation of LibKey in a discovery environment and how users responded.
* Irrelevant Discovery Layers? An Evidence-based Evaluation of Three Common Library Search Tools (Ruth Szpunar, Eric Bradley, Erin Gabrielson, and Catherine Pellegrino) compares search results from a discovery layer with a central index, a subscription interdisciplinary index and abstract database, and a freely accessible academic web search engine.
* Weaving the Threads of Bibliographic Ontologies: Application of a Reference Ontology to Advance Semantic Interoperability (Helena Patricio, Pedro Nogueira Ramos, and Maria Inés Cordeiro) shows how a reference ontology could allow the integration of different ontologies without imposing a common central one to overcome limitations of mapping techniques.
* Web Archives Metadata Generation with GPT-40: Challenges and Insights (Ashwin Nair, Abigail Huang YongPing, Zhen Rong Goh, and Tianrui Liu) explores how GPT-40 was used to generate metadata for Web Archives (WARC) files.
* Prospects of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for Academic Library Search and Retrieval (Ravi Varma Kumar Bevara, Brady D. Lund, Nishith Reddy Mannuru, Sai Pranathi Karedla, Yara Mohammed, Sai Tulasi Kolapudi, and Aashrith Mannuru) examines the integration of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems within academic library environments.
This issue also has our regular contributed columns:
* From the Field: Starting up a Digital Preservation (Pilot) Program (Kimberly Hoffman) describes how Hamilton College started a project to pilot Archivematica, a digital preservation platform.
* ITAL & ...: Learning, Listening, and Leading: A Systems Librarian's First Year (Amber Wu) reflects on the experience of starting as a Systems Librarian after that position was vacant for an extended time.
* Public Libraries Leading the Way: Ready Year One: Lessons Learned During Our First Year in Virtual Reality (Dalton Bennett) chronicles the first year of establishing a Virtual Reality (VR) program at the Paul Sawyier Public Library in Frankfort, Kentucky.
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 propose a topic, get in touch!
Kenneth J. Varnum, Editor
Marisha C. Kelly, Assistant Editor
© 2025. This work is published under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ (the "License"). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.