Technology around the world

The growth of the Web and the increasing reliance on the Internet for interactive applications and information discovery has changed the technological culture map. That does not mean that everything has become identical. Languages that use different scripts, for example, create different problems in display and in searching. Unicode can solve many of the display issues, but it does not resolve the grammatical assumptions build into search engines designed for western language texts. Linux, MS-Windows, Macintosh OS-X all provide the basic computing infrastructure for contemporary systems that link to the Internet and share resources like Google, del.icio.us, Blogspot, or YouTube. Nonetheless many problems are similar. In this issue we have collected a number of examples. Four sets of shared problems emerge in these articles: technology applications to solve specific library problems, user studies, cataloging issues, and electronic publishing. These are topics that librarians discuss around the world. All four had substantial coverage at the German Library Association conference in Mannheim, Germany, in June 2008, and the program for the American Library Association annual meeting in Anaheim, California, gives them equal attention.