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The article reports on the continued consolidation in the integrated library system marketplace. It says that some major acquisitions in the last eighteen months have included Polaris acquisition by Innovative Interfaces, VTLS by Innovative Interfaces and Ex Libris by ProQuest. It adds that all of these has been documented by Marshall Breeding in his Library Technology Guides.

The article explores the changing landscape of purchasing scholarly electronic books by libraries. Both libraries and publishers are expected to benefit from short-term loans (STLs). The attitude of libraries towards demand-driven acquisition (DDA) and STLs is compared. It is noted that publishers need the stabilization of revenue streams in order to continue to operate.

The article presents information on the aggregation of access to digital repositories. Libraries have increasingly embraced the idea of digital repositories in several varied forms, for the last decade or so. Among the tools deployed in several libraries are Digital Commons, ContentDM, Vital, and Alma.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including mobile apps for interactive printing, the importance of mobile apps in the development of library collection, and the importance of use metrics for library electronic resources (e-resources).

The article presents information on the publication and editorial policy of "The Charleston Advisor."

The author reflects on academic freedom. He cites the concept behind the academic freedom according to the Association of American University Presses (AAUP). He claims that academic freedom has broad application to give scholars the freedom to freely publish and express their research opinions. He notes several legal actions that negatively impact academic freedom.

In this article the author discusses the trend of U.S. academic and public libraries acquiring electronic books as a response to user demand and the changing environment. He explores the agreements of academic libraries with aggregators such as EBL, ebrary and Project MUSE. He also mentions the effort of public libraries to work with aggregators such as Overdrive and 3M.

The author highlights several mobile applications for libraries. He suggests the advantage of mobile friendly Web sites designed to detect the operating system of the incoming browser and will automatically switch to a mobile friendly interface. He notes that mobile applications provide a nice approach to offering small screen functionality for a resource. Examples of these applications include Android, Windows Mobile and Blackberry.

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses reports within the issue on topics devoted to Islam and the Middle Eastern e-Resources for the student and scholar.

The article discusses concerns and approaches to electronic books (e-books). The first e-book initiative, Project Gutenberg was launched in 1971 by Michael S. Hart which enlisted volunteers to digitize public domain titles and make them available online for free. In an editorial titled "Ebooks on Fire, Chuck Hamaker cites many concerns on e-books including the loss of historic privileges and revocable rights.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including an interview with Sam Brooks, senior vice president of sales and marketing with EBSCO Publishing about its acquisition of H.W. Wilson, reviews of international products and services such as DigiZeitschriften and the journal's participation in the international linking service.

The article reports the announcement of the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) to move local library management to Web scale. Reason for the decision is provided along with its declared goal. The implications of the announcement are examined in relation to its expanding role. Its initiatives over the last few years are presented together with the resulting high-level of tension and ambiguity in the marketplace. Failures are cited including questions on its non-profit status.

The article discusses the impact of economic difficulties on libraries of all types. Ways of coping with the impact include reducing hours, laying off staff and reducing the budget for collections. Many contracts between libraries and publishers lack provisions for dissolution due to financial duress, which usually means a loss of key services.

The author discusses the agreement between "The Charleston Advisor" (TCA) and the Center for Research Libraries (CRL). With the deal, TCA will be publishing the Trusted Repositories Audit and Certification (TRAC) reports from CRL and an executive summary of one or more reports that will be connected to the CRL web site. TCA's areas of focus include content, pricing, user interface, and contract issues for products and services.

The article announces awards given to electronic services and databases including the Best New Product to Teen Health and Wellness, Best New End-User Product to Zotero and Most Improved Product to Thomson Gale PowerSearch and Gale Virtual Reference Library.

The article offers information on the migration of "The Charleston Advisor" (TCA) to a custom built platform using the Ingenta ByDesign service. The front end of the journal is written in personal home page (PHP) and operates in a Linux based MySQL server. It also contains the journal homepage, highlighted articles, letters to the editor and the TCA scoreboard. Ingenta feeds articles and table of contents to users and offers new features such as rich sites summaries (RSS) feeds, table of contents alerting services, COUNTER compliant statistics and better exposure to Internet search engines. With the new service, TCA has stopped doing reader reviews and offers portable document format (PDF) views of articles and not a hypertext markup language (HTML) version.

The article discusses the effect of the flood of mergers and acquisitions on the online community. The acquisition of ProQuest by the Cambridge Information Group represents a consolidation in the online database arena. Further diminishing diversity and choice is the expected sale of the Gale group by Thomson in 2007. The mergers are of concern to some as it can result in less competition with concomitant price increases, less competitive innovation in user interface design, and other negative effects due to a more consolidated market.

The article announces awards given to electronic resources and databases including the Google News Archive as the Best New Product, YouTube.com as the Best New End-User Product and Readex Newsbank as the Most Improved Product.

This section introduces several articles and topics featured in this anniversary issue of "The Charleston Adviser," including reviews of Web-based services to help librarians analyze and access their digital content and assessment of several Open Access databases.

This section presents information on the winners of the Fifth Annual Readers' Choice Awards sponsored by The Charleston Advisor regarding the best and worst electronic services and databases for libraries in the U.S. in 2005. The recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award is Eugene Garfield for his pioneering work in citation analysis and the development of Science Citation Index and its derivatives through the Institute for Scientific Information. Smithsonian Global Sound grabbed the Best New Products award for offering a unique body of recorded sound representing world cultures and music. Thomson Gale's New InfoTrac Search Interface was awarded the Most Improved Product award for updating a popular search system with a much cleaner presentation for the end user.

Pays tribute to the late Judith Carol Wilkerson, head of serials at the Robert M. Bird Library at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Library.

Pays tribute to Richard S. Huleatt, a publisher in the information industry, who died on February 11, 2004.

This article introduces the January 2004 issue of "The Charleston Advisor," which deals with open access and scholarly publishing. Libraries are canceling journals at an ever increasing pace due to declining or static materials budgets and high prices. The scholarly community has acknowledge the dilemma for some time and many new initiatives have arisen to provide alternate publishing models. Initiatives such as local institutional repositories, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, BioMed Central, PubMed Central, Public Library of Science, BioOne and others have each approached the problem in unique ways. Some initiatives provide low-cost publishing venues for existing societies, others have launched new journals to challenge high-priced commercial counterparts and some use new funding models to pay for their efforts. Three Opinion Editorials in the issue combine to offer an overview of the topic. John Cox summarizes the current state of journal publishing, the logic behind the mergers and gives a quick look at publishing models. Margaret Landesman has posited that one of the main issues in the crisis is not necessarily journal price increases but the raw price of journals.