Welcome to Issue 4 of the Code4Lib Journal!. The journal sports an updated look that gives a bit more streamlined and unified appearance to articles. Thanks go to Sean Hannan and editorial committee member Jonathan Brinley for the initial inspiration and the implementation of the final design, respectively.

In keeping with our tradition (if 4 occurrences of something can have such), this issue contains articles on a breadth of topics. We start with a handful of how-to articles: Daniel Talsky on using the Serial Solutions link resolver API to auto-populate an interlibrary loan form and Alfred Kramer on mining citation data from ISI Web of Science® to assist in deciding whether it is more cost effective to subscribe to a journal or purchase articles one at a time based on citations of that journal in your scholars’ work. Ross Singer and James Farrugia provide details about Jangle, a specification employing simple, common and well supported web protocols to enable the creation, maintenance and distribution of resources among library-related data sources. Pam Sessoms and Eric Sessoms describe LibraryH3lp, an integrated IM and web chat system designed specifically for virtual reference services in libraries based on the Jabber protocol. LibraryH3lp offers an open-source alernative to current tools such as Meebo.

In his article describing the workings of the OpenBook WordPress Plugin, John Miedema describes the tool he wrote for book reviewers, book bloggers, library webmasters, and anyone else who wants to put book covers and data on their WordPress blog or website. Karin Herm and Sibylle Volz write about the Library Search Engine, a next-generation catalog implemented at the Cooperative Library Network Berlin-Brandenburg (KOBV) in Germany. The LSE indexes local bibliographic holdings, open source items, licensed journals, institutional publications, primary data, and the content of bibliographical databases.

We conclude the issue with a book review by editorial committee member Christine Schwartz. Schwartz compares two books about FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records): Robert Maxwell’s FRBR: A Guide for the Perplexed and Understanding FRBR: What It Is and How It Will Affect Our Retrieval Tool, edited by Arlene Taylor.

The strength of the Code4Lib Journal lies in its readers.  You are not only the audience but also the authors for the articles published here. We hope the items you see in this, and future, issues inspire you to innovate and to share your discoveries with the rest of us.