Editorial
We present the winter issue of our journal the Library: a librarianship review, in which several historical and contemporary subjects intertwine. Historical themes are connected with recent research of the heritage and provenance of books and book collections from the “reserve” stock of the National library of the Czech Republic; Marcela Strouhalová writes on the basis of the results of archival and other research of WW2 book confiscations, their movement during the war and about the logistics and other aspects of transfers of large library collections on our territory after the war. Petra Večeřová’s contribution is dedicated to selected problems of Czechoslovak librarianship in the period 1939-1959 also in connection with the fate of the already mentioned library entities during the war and in the post-war years, but more from the point of view of our large library institutions who suddenly became responsible for huge amounts of ownerless library materials. The article by Pavlína Mazáčová and Kateřina Hanušová from the Masaryk University in Brno comes with the topical subject of the development of pre-reading skills using the method of intergenerational learning. These three contributions appear in the reviewed part of the journal.
The non-reviewed part of the issue is dedicated to contemporary problems starting with the article of this year’s MARK award holder Linda Jansová, focusing on the phenomenon of information science.
Another very interesting article is an overview study of the author Vladana Pillerová based on the research of age, pay and educational structure of library workers in the Czech Republic. How are we doing, where and whether we have, as library employees, moved (for instance from the point of view of educational or financial reward in various types of libraries (either public, university, specialised or others) is presented using also graphs and tables (this subject, albeit in American environment, is also covered by one of the contributions annotated in the section of New foreign literature on librarianship.
Current situation in libraries and their development in the near future is a theme that also resonates in the interview with professor Andrew Lass on the occasion of this year’s CASLIN conference. We hope that the interview will be seen by the review’s readership just as enriching and beneficial as it is by its editor.
In the reviews we look at two publications that complement the contents of the current issue. The publication Books regained: the confiscated books after the Second World War in the administration of the NK ČR (review by Petra Večeřová who, in a restrained way, added some personal observations) and a Bratislava miscellany Library and information science (a very detailed analysis and evaluation by Linda Jansová).
The issue closes with the New foreign literature on librarianship. In this section we are presenting several contributions from the IFLA Journal.
It is the end of 2017. Let me sum up, therefore, this year’s activities of our editorial board. Apart from the work on the journal itself we were, as a medial partner, present at the conferences: Inforum, Libraries in past and present, the Conference on grey literature, Archives, libraries and museums in the digital world conference, LibCon and others. We also went to Bratislava to attend the Conference on periodicals past and present and to Wroclaw to the IFLA Conference.
You might be asking what our review gains by the Board’s presence at these events. First of all – new contacts (whether potential authors or reviewers), ideas (of which there is never enough, including the reviewed journal), new subjects – and most importantly the feeling that we are here for our subject field and do our best to serve it well. We have an educational, information and archival function. We have to make ourselves known to authors and offer them the possibility of publishing.
First of all we are here for you, our readers, so please let us know about anything that our journal could do for you.
Many thanks go to all, without whom the Knihovna could not be published; members of the Editorial Board for their work and readers for their continued support.
On behalf of the Board I would like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2018.
Renáta Salatová
Editorial Assistant
