John MacColl with the editorial from issue 11 of the print version of Ariadne.
Culture emerges as a strong theme in this issue of ARIADNE. Our Interface interviewee, on the opposite page, is Dan Fleming of the Formations Project, which is launching a pre-prints server for cultural studies. How do you change the working culture of academics working in cultural studies? Are they more susceptible to change and paradigm shifting than colleagues in other disciplines?
The organisational culture of library and information services also moves into the spotlight in this issue. Catherine Edwards of the IMPEL2 Project provides our main feature article. We also feature a report from the SKIP Project in our eLib Project profile section. Emerging from both projects are a number of trends which reflect the impact which the 'electronic library' is now having on the organisational structures within universities designed to handle and deliver the information required by students, researchers and teachers.
What stands out, against all the positive developments, is a sense of bewilderment, shared by new graduate para-professionals, by subject specialists, by a new breed of hybrid information workers, and by managers. As the Electronic Libraries Programme moves into its final year, the work of the training and awareness projects is likely to grow in importance, and the organisational issues in the slipstream of technological change will remain as a legacy of the Programme which JISC must continue to address.
Material on this page is copyright Ariadne/original authors. This article last updated/links checked on 10-Sep-1997