Introducing Emerging Library & Information Perspectives (ELIP)

September 10, 2018

September is Performance & Learning Month, formerly Learn @ Work Week.

Throughout the month, Librarianship.ca will highlight resources available to support members of the Canadian librarianship community in their continuing professional development.

First up: an introduction to Emerging Library & Information Perspectives (ELIP)—a new open access, peer-reviewed journal launched by MLIS students at Western University—by its founding managing editor, Madison Edgar.

Introducing Emerging Library & Information Perspectives (ELIP): a new open access, peer-reviewed and student run journal grounded in experiential learning

Madison Edgar
Former Managing Editor, ELIP

Emerging Library & Information Perspectives (ELIP), published by the FIMS Graduate Library at Western University and hosted by Western Libraries, published its inaugural issue this year! The scope of the journal includes contributions related to the field of library and information science, broadly construed. The journal accepts submissions from current Western University MLIS students in the form of research articles, critical essays, reviews, interviews, pieces written practically for the field, and pieces written from experiences working in the field.

ELIP breaks through barriers in scholarly communication by being freely accessible and available online to people inside or outside the field of library and information science. The journal encourages perspectives on all different types of librarianship or information work, and also accepts multimodal content such as audio, video and images.

To facilitate experiential learning, students enrolled in the MLIS course Scholarly Communication and Open Access Publishing acted as the Editorial Team for the journal’s inaugural issue. Aligning the journal with coursework encouraged student engagement in conversations about trends and practices in scholarly communication and allowed them to develop their skills by participating in peer review and production tasks.

Students in the course had varying levels of experience with scholarly communication and could use the course as a safe environment in order to ask questions and try out the roles of peer reviewers and production editors. Other course assignments addressed the exploration of different journal funding models and promotional strategies. Students who completed the course will now be better positioned to provide publishing support as librarians, be able to think critically about sustainable publishing models, and become more informed scholars themselves as they move through academia and into their careers.

For some of our authors, ELIP was the first place they submitted work to be considered for publication. Throughout the process, it was a privilege to see students gain confidence and publishing experience either as authors or editors, taking pride in their work and in the creation of a tangible contribution to the field. Overall, ELIP’s integration with the course creates an effective link between theoretical and active learning and grounds students’ understanding of the complexities of open access and publishing cycles in a concrete context.

ELIP is available online at https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/elip/index.

Madison Edgar was the Managing Editor for the inaugural issue of Emerging Library & Information Perspectives and is a recent graduate of MLIS program at Western University.