About the Journal
Focus and Scope
PNLA Quarterly is the official journal of the Pacific NorthwestLIbrary Association. PNLA Quarterly's content includes a combination of peer- reviewed and editor-reviewed articles, focused on the region and its librarianship.
Publication Frequency
PNLA Quarterly is published four times a year. The Winter issue is a conference issue.
Open Access Policy
This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. All content is CC Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 licensed.
Sources of Support
Editorial Advisory Board, 2018-2019
Whitney Buccicone, Special Collections Cataloging Librarian, University of Washington Libraries
Julie Carmen, Research Librarian, Central Washington University
Megan Clark, Public Services Librarian, Yellowknife Public Library (NT)
Ariel Kleber, Community Librarian, Edmonton Public Library-Meadows (AB)
Robert Perret, First Year Experience Librarian, University of Idaho
Marisa Petrich, Instructional Design Librarian, University of Washington-Tacoma
Kristen Rebmann, Associate Professor, San Jose State University School of Information (CA)
Jennifer Ward, Outreach Services Librarian, University of Alaska Southeast
Mary Wise, Music Librarian, Central Washington University
Journal History
Hello readers! Welcome to your new PNLA Quarterly. In a nutshell, it’s all about regional content, open access, and discoverability.
PQ has been in publication since 1936 and has gone through as many changes as PNLA itself. In the early 2000’s the PNLA board decided that administrative items such as the reports of our chapter representatives would no longer be published in the PQ but would be posted on our Web site. This opened the door for more substantive content and moved PQ from primarily a newsletter format to a forum for ideas about libraries, professional development, information access, technologies, and other topics of regional interest written by practitioners and students in the area. Several years later, PQ became an online only publication.
Since then the content of PNLA Quarterly has grown to include a combination of peer- reviewed and editor-reviewed articles,a move that has increased the substance of its content but also shifted focus away from the region. One of our primary goals for the Quarterly’s evolution is to return to publishing more content about issues of interest to libraries in the Pacific Northwest.
We plan to continue this regional focus and to offer diverse but balanced content relevant to public, academic, and special libraries.
We would also like to build on the laudable move PNLA made several years ago in making PQ an open access journal by improving our ability to serve up the full-text of individual articles. Rather than one long PDF file, you’ll see that this issue also offers individually downloadable files for every article. This, along with the addition of keywords for each article, should help improve the discovery rate of PQ content and give our authors more exposure on the Web, while improving indexing by vendors such as Ebsco. This shift in editorship for PQ provides an opportunity to investigate how the journal might benefit from new practices and resources in scholarly communication, particularly those that have come out of the open access movement.
