Fifty years of library and information history.

It has been fifty years since, in the spring of 1967, Library and Information History first appeared under the title of Library History. It was launched by the Library History Group of the then Library Association to replace a newsletter that had been distributed since 1963. Peter Hoare stated in the editorial of the first issue that the group hoped ‘to provide an appropriate medium for the publication and recording’ of recent research in the history of libraries and librarianship and that the journal hoped ‘to provide a focus for those working on or interested in the development of libraries and book-collecting, particularly in Britain but also abroad’. It is fair to say that in the fifty years which have followed, the journal has certainly lived up to those goals and ambitions. The vision which Peter Hoare and others had in 1967 has resulted in a journal which has published articles and reviews that have significantly contributed to the expansion of knowledge in many diverse aspects of cultural history