Guest Editorial by Prof Philip Hider, RAILS 2019 Program Committee Chair

This issue features some of the papers presented at the Fifteenth Australasian Conference on Research Applications in Information and Library Studies (RAILS), held on 28th and 29th of October 2019, at St Mark’s National Theological Centre in Canberra, and convened by the School of Information Studies of Charles Sturt University. A total of sixty participants from eight countries attended the conference, which had as its theme,‘Towards critical information research, education and practice’, in recognition of the keyrole that the information professions play in ‘combatting social injustice, social exclusion, digital divides, censorship, filtering, and misinformation, and attempts to undermine democracy, freedom of information and the right to know’, as the conference website (https://railsconference.com/rails-2019) puts it.