ABOUT THE JOURNAL - POLISH LIBRARIES

Polish Libraries is an English-language peer-reviewed academic journal published yearly by the National Library of Poland and addressed to foreign library milieus. It is included on the Ministry of Education and Science’s official List of Ranked Scholarly Journals with 100 points. It is also indexed by Scopus and ERIH PLUS.

It aims at presenting issues related to historical and current challenges facing Polish libraries and library and information studies, including their ancillary and related sciences. The articles published in the journal cover a broad scope of topics and research fields, such as history, with history of libraries in particular, theory of bibliography, cataloguing, archival science, museology, manuscriptology, codicology, bookbinding studies, conservation and restoration, library statistics and sociology, readership studies, art history, musicology, and literary studies.

All of the articles published in the journal are peer reviewed by experts who do not know the identity of authors and vice versa (double-blind reviewing process). The reviewers are acknowledged external specialists, that is, they are not employed by the publisher. The editorial board of the Polish Libraries has been gradually increasing the number of reviews prepared by scholars affiliated to foreign research institutions. Not only does it help improve the academic quality of the articles, but it also aims at raising the awareness of the existence of the journal abroad.

The editors of the Polish Libraries strive to establish closer connections with foreign authors and academic centres, especially those whose research profiles are related to Poland. They operate, among others, in Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Austria, Germany, France or Great Britain, where numerous Polonica are found in historical collections and archives. We do not want to be confined to providing our readers solely with exhaustive monographic syntheses (whose publication is always considerably delayed due to their extent), but we also wish to put emphasis on presenting recent contributions summarizing up-to-date research results and on-going debates and developments that are significant to Polish and global library and information science.

The latter include innovative methods of cataloguing (such as the Descriptors of the National Library of Poland that are being currently implemented), as well as trailblazing projects organized or co-ordinated by the National Library of Poland (OMNIS, PATRIMONIUM, ACADEMICA, POLONA) that follow or set the newest trends in the world that are of prime importance to improving the availability of library collections to local and global academia and to promotion of reading in general.