And on the subject of ISTL, their latest issue is out as well. This one concentrates on agricultural librarianship and prints the contents of the United States Agricultural Information Network conference from 2003. Unfortunately, of the dozen or so entries on the TOC, only 4 (!) are full text, the rest abstracts only. I really doubt the usefulness of this, other than being able to contact the authors if you want more information. Also, on principle, I hate when journals reprint conference proceedings. Those proceedings really belong in one of the various eprint servers (see previous post). I hate to be negative about a journal that I generally think is the best one out there for scitech librarians, but I gotta call 'em as I see 'em.

As for the other content in ISTL, I would not hesitate to recommend it's high quality. I won't list all the contents here, as would should all be checking it out anyway. I will mention a couple of articles particularly relevant to our mission here:

• "The NASA Astrophysics Data System" by Leith B. Woodall. A database review of a db we already probably all know about, but I always find it useful to refresh my memory with articles like this.
  
• "The Top Ten Things a new Sci/Tech Librarian Should Know: Developing Core Competencies" by Victoria S. Mitchell is actually several lists, my fave point is: "Your colleagues are just as clueless or insecure as you are." Not that I'm clueless or insecure ;-) This is based on a session at the 2003 ALA conference in Toronto.