D-Lib Magazine

July/August 2015
Volume 21, Number 7/8

Editorial

Twenty Years and Counting

Laurence Lannom
Corporation for National Research Initiatives
llannom@cnri.reston.va.us

DOI: 10.1045/july2015-editorial

The first issue of D-Lib Magazine, under the guidance of its founding editor Amy Friedlander, was issued in July 1995 and CNRI has been publishing it on time and without interruption ever since. In addition to the current editorial team, we would like to thank Bill Arms and Bonnie Wilson for their contributions over the years, and the current and past support of the D-Lib Alliance, the National Science Foundation, and Robert Kahn, President and CEO of CNRI, for his unwavering support of the magazine for twenty years. But most of all we want to thank the hundreds of authors who have contributed their insights and project updates over the years, as well as our past, current, and future readers, whom we hope and believe have benefited from these efforts.

The first issue had articles on digital library architecture and metadata, topics that we have continued to cover, in some cases resulting in seminal articles whose readership remains gratifyingly strong years after the initial article publication. Our current issue covers these same topics, albeit in an evolved form and, in a happy coincidence, includes an opinion piece discussing the twentieth anniversary of the report that led fairly directly to the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), a staple of the digital library world for much of the last two decades.

It was instructive to compare the 1995 articles to the current set. The world of digital library research and practice has seen great advances since 1995 but much remains to be done. And it has to be done while the environment within which the digital library community works is itself changing, presenting new challenges and opportunities on a regular basis. None of us can predict the next twenty years of digital library work, neither the specifics of that work nor the technical and social environment in which it will take place. What we can do, as a community, is to focus on moving that work in the direction of making well-curated information resources widely available, as a public good, in an evolving digital realm.

About the Editor

Laurence Lannom is Director of Information Services and Vice President at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), where he works with organizations in both the public and private sectors to develop experimental and pilot applications of advanced networking and information management technologies.