Emerald teams with the Gates Foundation’s Global Libraries initiative to promote research

Emerald Group Publishing set up an informal arrangement with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Libraries initiative, which aims to provide public access to information through computers in public libraries. Under this arrangement, Emerald publishes the findings of the Global Libraries initiative on Impact Planning and Assessment and makes them freely accessible nine months post official publication. Global Libraries initiative are now hosting easy to read summaries of the eleven articles published in a special issue of Emerald’s journal Performance Measurement and Metrics (Volume 13, Issue 1). The summaries, dedicated to Impact Planning and Assessment, can also be used as a teaching resource and have been published for the benefit of information professionals and practitioners around the world.

Five of the summaries and a glossary of Impact Planning and Assessment acronyms are now available on the WebJunction website and will also be hosted on a selection of authors’ websites featured in the special issue of Performance Measurement and Metrics, as detailed below:

WebJunction website

http://webjunction.org/documents/webjunction/impact-planning-assessment-worldwide.html 

Recipients of the Global Libraries initiatives awards and author websites

Guest Editor, David Streatfield, Information Management Associates, and Global Libraries initiative Consultant to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, comments in his introduction to the Special Issue: “At a time when only 35 per cent of the world’s population is connected to the Internet and people in rural and poor communities are deprived of the economic, educational, health, and social opportunities which a digital world offers, the work of the Global Libraries initiative is making a worldwide impact on addressing this imbalance of opportunity.

This work shows the commitment of the Global Libraries Country-teams’ Impact Planning and Assessment Specialists to communicating what they are learning to public library evaluation specialists and to library service managers in other countries contemplating any kind of service innovation.”

As a global publisher, Emerald aims to link research and practice to the benefit of society. This arrangement with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation offers a perfect opportunity to further the dissemination of valuable, quality research to help develop literacy, including information literacy, and education.

For more details visit www.emeraldinsight.com/about/news/gates-foundation-2013.htm