Here’s hoping the ’sphere can cope with one more wiki: LISauthor. The LISauthor wiki is something that has resulted from a few projects I have been involved with over the past year and a half. It started as a personal project for me to conceptualise my thoughts on eScholarship, libraries/librarians as publishers, and connecting readers with writers, but I think that it will have value to a wider readership. I see it as being additional to some other sites that cover writing and research issues, with a few other topics that I feel (hope!) that there’s a need for. Because I’m Australian, the wiki will also feature many Australian issues.

Over the past year and a half I have written my first peer reviewed paper, worked on initiatives to assist in connecting new graduates with research and encouraging them to write, and I’ll be continuing to be the programme coordinator of NLS2006 until the end of this year. Each of these events have raised questions for me about the hows and whys of research and publishing. What motivation is there to write? Is it easy for people to keep up with the literature if they don’t work in a large library? What advice is out there on organising conference programmes?

What has been most clear to me recently is that librarians want to write – they want to tell their stories and lessons learnt. They don’t have to be on a tenure track or in any particular kind of library, or even any library to have the motivation to do so. On the other side, librarians also want to help others to write, and be publishers in their own right whether by running a conference and publishing the papers, or starting a newsletter or journal, or promoting deposit in repositories. Lastly, practitioners want to stay in touch with the most relevant research – and these days that could include tools like OPML Reading Lists, database alerts, Journal TOC feeds as well as more traditional browsing and serendipitous methods. With LISauthor I aim to look at all of these issues and think of ways to bridge the divides that sometimes form.

So please take a look, and if you have something to add please create an account and add it. The wiki is open to all. And I’m looking for logo ideas too!