Tibor Koltay

The first thing that I can say about myself as an author is that writing gives me satisfaction. My second statement is that I write exclusively on professional topics.

My writing 'career' began when a college friend engaged me in writing book reviews. Since then, I am "chained" to the keyboard of my computer. Not to forget that in the 1990s, I also edited for a few years two journals on medical librarianship, one in Hungarian, the other one in English, being an international one.

I began to write articles in Hungarian journals of library and information science then I found my place in international journals. If numbers count, I can tell that I published over 340 papers, mostly in Hungarian. Some of my articles in Hungarian appeared not because I wanted credit and prestige. Rather I intended to fulfil a mission to popularize information literacy among teachers, linguists and librarians.

My first book was published under peculiar circumstances, because writing textbooks on internet related subjects was open to volunteers. Already an experienced librarian, I cooperated with a young engineering student and we successfully brought together a few dozen pages on e-mail and discussion forums in 1997. Different topics on networking in libraries were the topic of my next four books, two of them online ones in the form of html files on the Internet.

In 1999, I co-authored and edited a handbook on research and publishing in the natural sciences. This Hungarian-language book has been widely used and renowned since then.

In 2007, I published a book in html again. It is about virtual and digital tools for the 21st century library.

Back in 2003, I wrote a small monograph on abstracting in Hungarian, which was followed by a more extensive one in English, titled Abstracts and Abstracting: A genre and set of skills for the twenty-first century in 2010. By the way, I also regularly write abstracts. If you would not know, let me tell that abstracts represent the most important information of a professional or scientific article in a shortened form. The actual number of my abstracts is 328.

Last year I wrote a small e-book on e-books by the request of a Hungarian publisher.

Even though in my profession it is not especially typical working with co-authors, I did venture to do so a few times. The newest result of this is that Chandos Publishing is going to publish Research 2.0 and the future of information literacy soon. This is our new book, written with Sonja Špiranec from Croatia and László Z. Karvalics from Hungary. All of us teach library and information science at our respective universities.

Writing for me is closely connected with teaching. My involvement in this 'business' began in 1992, when I returned from my first Fulbright scholarship from the United States. I love teaching in higher education and for a long time I educated not only 'librarians of the future', but translation students, as well. Delivering presentations at conferences is also a pleasant challenge for me.

I can boast with my foreign language skills, because I can read, speak and write German, Russian and Spanish, though the language that I use for the profession is English.