By Tim Lepczyk

I joined the Editorial Committee of the Code4Lib Journal over two years ago.  I had jumped at the chance to combine my professional interests in library technology with my personal interests in writing. Now, in 2012, change is coming to both my personal and professional life. This summer, I’m getting married, relocating to Arkansas, and starting a new job. With all of these changes in mind, it is with regret that I announce my departure from the Editorial Committee.  However, change never happens in isolation.

As editors step aside, new people have joined the Editorial Committee in order to continue the Journal’s success. Please welcome Peter Murray, Terry Reese, Elisa Graydon, Sara Amato, and Shawn Averkamp as the committee’s newest members. It takes some time to find the balance between the journal, work, and one’s personal life, but I’m confident these five people will find it. Continuing the theme of change, it’s time to turn our attention to the articles published in this issue and read how the contributors dealt with change or created change in their institutions through the use of technology.

Kirk Hess’ article “Discovering Digital Library User Behavior with Google Analytics” delves into Google Analytics and demonstrates how libraries can track events and analyze data in order to better understand user behaviour.

Libraries often face issues regarding tight budgets, limited staff, and a large amount of processing. In the article “The Martha Berry Digital Archive Project: A Case Study in Experimental pEDagogy” Stephanie A. Schlitz and Garrick S. Bodine write about the problems their team faced and how they overcame these challenges.

Some challenges libraries face are broader than what comes across in a case study. For instance, if your library is interested in using user-generated content for bibliographic records, how might the problem be approached? One answer is in “Using Semantic Web Technologies to Collaboratively Collect and Share User-generated Content to Enrich the Presentation of Bibliographical Records–Development of a Prototype Based on RDF, D2RQ, Jena, SPARQL and WorldCat’s FRBRization Web Service” written by Ragnhild Holgersen, Michael Preminger, and David Massey.

“GLIMIR: Manifestation and Content Clustering within WorldCat” by Janifer Gatenby, Richard O. Greene, W. Michael Oskins, and Gail Thornburg discusses a project to mine WorldCat’s vast store of bibliographic data to create record clusters and identifiers that will help bring together disparate versions of metadata for the same thing at multiple levels and provide new tools to connect library data with other applications.

Automation can be a great tool for change. Doreva Belfiore shows how Perl and CGI scripts streamline their workflow in “Case Study: Using Perl and CGI Scripts to Automate a Quality Control Workflow for Scanned Congressional Documents.”

Finally, when planning for change or moving across the country, maps are wonderful tools to use. In “From the Catalog to the Book on the Shelf: Building a Mapping Application for Vufind” by Kathleen Bauer, Michael Friscia, and Scott Matheson you will learn how the Yale University Library created a mapping application for mobile devices.

We hope you find the issue informative and inspiring. As a community, Code4Lib encourages experimentation and collaborative problem solving. Hopefully, the articles above will help you envision ways you can improve services and change things for the better at your institution.