Welcome to Our New Home

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SLJ's new look is more than a facelift. It gives us room to grow.

As the world awoke each morning this year, sipped coffee, and devoured the latest Harry Potter installment, the staff at School Library Journal quietly built the magazine a new home. On the brink of a new and extremely wired century, the profession finds itself in the enviable but challenging position of being increasingly in demand. The growing importance that parents place on early childhood exposure to reading, language activities, and library programming, as well as your familiarity withelectronic resources and research skills, means that your expertise is more sought after now than ever.

SLJ's charge, then, is simple: to keep you ahead of the curve professionally. In this issue, you'll find new content and a design conceived with your needs in mind. In fact, the redesign process helped us create a structure that will seamlessly accommodate coverage of materials in emerging formats as soon as they' re ready to appear on library shelves. Or, for that matter, library screens.

In Democracy and Education, the philosopher and educator John Dewey defined education as a "reconstruction or reorganization of experience." He believed that reorganization itself-the pulling apart and rebuilding- adds meaning to an experience. I found that useful to remember this year. By taking apart the magazine piece by piece, much like peeling off the leaves of an artichoke to reach its heart, we grew wiser about what this journal can, and should, offer you.

This fall, you'll see all that you've come to rely on in our pages (some columns have been relocated or placed in our new technology section), plus new material. Here's a partial tour.

A Monthly Technology Column In "Chat Room," Walter Minkel, our technology editor, will challenge you to think about technology in new ways, with the ultimate goal of helping you transfer all you know about libraries and young people to emerging formats.

A New Stand-Alone Reference Review SLJ's new Reference Review will house our first regularly scheduled reviews of subscription-based electronic resources, such as online encyclopedias. This quarterly section, first appearing in November's issue, will offer critical reviews of reference materials in all formats-print, CD-ROM, and online.

A First-Ever Series of Author/Illustrator Interviews As insatiable readers, we're curious about the people who create books-and always in search of insights we can pass on to you so you can pass them along to young booklovers. For our first interview, we're featuring J. K. Rowling, author of the insanely popular Harry Potter series.

The "What Works" Column This column, a reworking of "Practically Speaking," will help you and your colleagues share effective practices, including proven ways to run a foolproof scavenger hunt and help students apply critical thinking to research. I invite you to write a "What Works "column for us. Its practical nature and brevity make it a perfect place to start a long and successful publishing career. E-mail your ideas to Associate Editor Andrea Glick at aglick@slj.cahners.com.

Fresh Typefaces We chose our new typefaces for their readability, as well as for their ability to gracefully fit as much text as possible on the page, a crucial factor given our desire to provide you with the largest number of reviews of youth materials available anywhere.

A New Home for Reviews of Professional Titles Professional reading will move into the book review section, following Adult Books for Young Adults.

I've not been popular in the office lately, since scheduling the redesign for the new school year robbed our staff of the summer. For this, I must thank our editors for refraining from taking tire irons to their computers when new systems failed to function. I also thank Deborah Rieders, our talented and indefatigable art director, for her simple and elegant design.

Your tour continues the minute you turn this page. When you' re finished, I'd love to hear your impressions.

Renée Olson
Editor-in-Chief
rolson@slj.cahners.com