Our article “The Modern History of Alcohol Research: Introducing the Rutgers Digital Alcohol Studies Archives” is now available in the May 2024 of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs (JSAD) showcasing the digital collection.
The idea of sharing the new Rutgers resource with the scholarly community in a peer-reviewed article was born at the “Meet Emerging Addiction Challenges Symposium” hosted by the Center of Alcohol and Substance Use Studies (CAS) at Rutgers in June 2023. Outgoing JSAD editor-in-chief Thomas Babor, an exceptional supporter of addiction libraries, Bill Bejarano, and myself were sitting at the same table, talking, just like back in 2015-2016. Updating Dr. Babor on the latest news on the preservation and digitization of the defunct CAS Library also involved a quick trip to the Annex to fetch the photo album from Mark Keller’s Recognition Dinner held in 1977, which is probably one of the scarce resources with colored pictures of many dignitaries in alcohol studies, who attended the event. There was no need for lengthy explanations on the value of the digital archives launched a few weeks before the event.
Long story short, the article was drafted, reviewed, and rewritten (including Nick Allred as one of the main content creators in the past few years too), submitted, peer-reviewed, re-otganized, and re-submitted, edited, and proofed. It was very rewarding to see the accepted version as a pre-pub as early as January on the JSAD homepage under “Just Accepted.”
It is just as rewarding to share the published final version with the addiction science community, including our friends at SALIS, the professional organization of the Substance Abuse Librarians and Information Specialists. In no time they came to help and shared the article on the SALIS homepage as a news item. SALIS is an international organization, and colleagues from the UK and Australia also expressed their intent to spread the word about the Digital Alcohol Studies Archives and the JSAD article.
Additionally, JSAD now also has a LinkedIn page, where they can tag authors. We are confident that it will be a great opportunity to share information about new publications with audiences interested in topics published in the Journal, including our article on alcohol studies history and related resources.
The JSAD Facebook and Twitter account had been set up long ago, when the Library was still operating, and it’s great to see increasing traffic on social media for scholars. As a librarian, I don’t particularly mind how people find me when they need information, as long as they find me. They do, as proven my consistently high statistics over the years.
Who knew that a scholarly article, if promoted properly, can do so much for a digital collection?
Jellinek and Keller would be proud to see how we follow their footsteps as we repackage information and promote valuable content so that it should reach diverse audiences!