Library Trends

This collection of essays is to honor Linda C. Smith, widely recognized as a well-established and dedicated teacher and scholar at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the soul of the iSchool. Smith's contributions to library and information science (LIS) research, teaching, and higher education administration, as an award-winning professor of LIS for the past forty-five years, have been characterized by attention to interdisciplinarity, people, and information technology. From the very beginning of her graduate studies, Smith targeted key aspects of the information revolution that would come to shape our technological world. Her impact on education for the information professions as well as on generations of graduate students has been a richly complex and multithreaded story. It is thus fitting that an issue in her honor recognize and laud Professor Smith as the renaissance scholar of LIS, trace the arc of a relevant past, and reflect on a future that Smith so presciently studied.

Smith's oeuvre includes her movement from pretenure basic research in a new area to the integration and transformation of that knowledge through research, teaching, and service as a distinguished and tenured professor. In her early work, Smith focused on how artificial intelligence techniques could be used to improve computerized information retrieval systems. Captured initially by the proliferation of databases and the impact they had on reference work and information behavior in libraries, she co-edited five editions of the key textbook in this area, Reference and Information Services: An Introduction. She has written one of the most highly cited articles on citation analysis (1981), which is also one of the most highly cited articles ever published in Library Trends. Among her many articles and contributions to the research and professional literature, she coedited a Festschrift in honor of her colleague Kathryn Luther Henderson, a book on technical services management (Smith and Carter 1996). Finally, she [End Page 1] has supported numerous students, both domestic and international, in pursuing their passions and achieving their goals.

It was Smith's support for her PhD students that brought together the two co-editors of this special issue. Those who know Linda Smith, especially her doctoral students, are cognizant that her editorial skills are unparalleled. As coeditors, we are thankful for her willingness to read and review the contributed articles as they came in. Such meticulous, and often invisible, editorial expertise is the kind of added support that Linda has generously and diligently provided her collaborators, colleagues, students, the iSchool and the University of Illinois over the many years of her work as a researcher.

This Festschrift is a testament to Linda Smith. It is done for her and with her. The articles in Linda's Festschrift represent the countless ways she has contributed to the discipline of LIS and helped to structure its evolution and growth as a field of knowledge and practice.

"Library and Information Science, Interdisciplinary Perspectives" is a collection of essays based on three central themes of Smith's prodigious work: library systems, intelligent and interdisciplinary services, and information sciences education. Smith's themes were selected from her writings, such as her very first research paper, "Systematic Searching of Abstracts and Indexes in Interdisciplinary Areas," which won the 1974 ASIS Student Paper Award and was published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science. While emerging trends were her motivation, Smith's goal for her research was to build capable computer systems and save the time of researchers and information users. That goal never changed, and it led her to study the different applications of computers beyond the sciences to humanities, engineering, and medicine. In the process she also became an astute administrator and a key influencer of LIS education.

The topics covered in this issue include LIS education, accreditation, teaching reference and bibliographic searching, navigating copyright, and serials modeling, concluding with admonitions for new roles in LIS in relation to data stewardship and interdisciplinarity and in relation to artificial intelligence and the responsibilities of LIS roles.