As the new editor of MELA Notes, I encourage you to submit articles for publication in our journal. Please also respond to the frequent announcements of Rachel Simon, the book review editor, of books available for review. If for some reason you do not subscribe to MELA-L, an important means of communication among MELA members and others in the field, where books for review are announced, please write or send e-mail to Rachel Simon to ask what is currently available. (See the masthead on the verso of the cover of the print version for addresses.)
At this time, there is a backlog of only two papers and one review scheduled to appear in MELA Notes 65 (Fall 1997). So please beat the bushes and hunt down some papers, of good quality naturally, for the editor to consider.
As you will remember from the 1995 MELA meeting in Washington, we agreed that MELA Notes should no longer be strictly a professional journal. Although we continue to publish materials of professional interest, we shall also make efforts to attract an increasing number of articles with scholarly content. Fawzi Khoury, the past editor, was successful in attracting a number of scholarly articles. I shall continue as editor to follow his efforts. I therefore request you to solicit contributions to MELA Notes from your colleagues, both library professionals and others whose scholarly interests are relevant to our professional or research specializations.
Might I suggest some topics, based on our discussions at the November, 1996, meeting. I recall, in particular, our discussions on Thursday morning at the RLG meeting. This was a very successful forum in which many of us raised some difficult and interesting issues:
1. The future of area studies librarianship
2. Technology, non-roman script languages, and the cataloguing utilities
3. Public access to the utilities
4. Retrospective cataloguing efforts and the benefits to library users
5. Other papers presented at earlier MELA conferences are also welcomed by the editor for inclusion in forthcoming issues of MELA Notes.
More specifically, I invite those who read papers at the 1996 MELA meeting in Providence to consider submitting them for publication. Their generally high quality and interesting content make them suitable for publication in this journal. One of those papers appears in this issue, and another will appear in the next.
You might have noticed the slight change in design of the masthead, including brief instructions to contributors. May I stress here also that I strongly encourage the submission papers and reviews in both print and electronic formats. Submission in electronic format (on disk, any format, or by e-mail as text in the body of the message or as a formatted encoded attachment) saves the editor the time and labor of re-keying or scanning contributions, but also the combination of electronic and print submission ensures greater accuracy in preserving or restoring formatting.
This issue of MELA Notes contains the membership and subscriber directory. Rather than the entire and quite lengthy directory, which includes non-current members and subscribers, this listing includes only current paid members' and subscribers' names and addresses. We hope to make the entire database available for searching from the MELA website sometime in the near future.
Beginning with this issue, MELA Notes will also be accessible in electronic format from the MELA website:
http://weber.u.washington.edu/marys/melahp.html
I would like to take the opportunity in this space to express our gratitude to Ahmad Jabbari and Mazda Publications for the substantial and much appreciated financial support for the printing of MELA Notes at little or no cost to MELA.