This will be the last of my posts about the conference (for now, at least) and I'll mainly use it to talk about the presentation I gave last Friday.
This was a lively lunch session titled New subjects, new communities, new formats: The library collection in the digital world - 75 minutes which included a presentation (about 45-50 minutes) and opportunities for discussion. I described my research project and then explored some issues relating to the challenges posed by emerging interdisciplinary subjects, new types of user community (communities of practice and online communities) and format issues in the digital world. I included some audience questions, gathering responses using a very basic voting system (pieces of paper of different colours and numbered 1-5) and asking the audience to record their responses on a questionnaire sheet. I'm very grateful to the audience for taking part in this - these responses will be very valuable to me as I try to refine some of the questions for inclusion in larger questionnaire which I'll be working on over the next few months. There were some really valuable contributions made during the discussion - I am particularly grateful to the people who pointed me towards Radical Reference (an example of a type of social enterprise information service acting for social justice), who suggested alternative search terms which I can use to extend my literature review and who discussed different approaches to linking to freely accessible web based materials. I was also very fortunate that my supervisor was able to be there, too (thank you!).
It was the longest presentation I've given so far about my research - it was good to be able to use some of the data I've collected over the summer and to feel that it might have value for library practitioners working in collection development and management, particularly people working with collections for interdisciplinary subjects. At the same time, I'm very aware that this project is still very much a work in progress: I'm only a year into the project and still very much in the initial stages of data collection and analysis, so it was very helpful to have suggestions about things I could improve.
Partly for this reason, I've been unsure about how widely to share the presentation - I feel that by sharing it I give some of its content a sort of permanence which doesn't really reflect how fluid this is. However, I have decided to add a version of the presentation to the Charleston Conference 2011 presentations site which I'd heartily recommend having a look at for many of the rest of the conference presentations. I've paraphrased some of the information from interviews, but the rest of the presentation is as I delivered it last week. I've also embedded it below - let me know what you think!
12 November 2011
10 November 2011
Charleston Conference, Part 5
On the final day of the conference, Saturday, I attended a morning plenary session by Brad Eden, Dean of Library Services, Valparaiso University focussing on change management and making risk taking change work for libraries. Particularly in technical services, he suggested that libraries can make radical changes - for example, by moving to open source library management systems (Koha, Blacklight, OCLC web scale management, Open Library Environment etc) rather than letting commercial vendors hold library data. Similarly, he argued that libraries, acting collectively, could fundamentally change current publishing models - if we're prepared to accept the possible instability which may result. Details of a report for university provosts and extensive quotations from another unpublished report were included in the presentation (I'll include a link to it when it's available). The talk closed with a discussion of self improvement and personal effectiveness techniques which can help to lead and deliver change.
Next I attended an innovation session looking at how LibGuides course pages can be used to find out about the information needs at course level by undergraduate students. This talk by Michael Matos and Robin Chin Roemer of the American University, Washington D.C. explored how librarians can use collaboration at a course level to find out more about emerging subject areas - particularly in really challenging cutting-edge fields. This talk seemed to reinforce the idea that course level guides are more valuable (and better used) than subject guides.
The final session I attended was a Hyde Park style discussion between Melody Burton, Chief Librarian, Okanagan Library, University of British Columbia and Kimberly Douglas, California Institute of Technology. Some key messages to take from this exchange:
Next I attended an innovation session looking at how LibGuides course pages can be used to find out about the information needs at course level by undergraduate students. This talk by Michael Matos and Robin Chin Roemer of the American University, Washington D.C. explored how librarians can use collaboration at a course level to find out more about emerging subject areas - particularly in really challenging cutting-edge fields. This talk seemed to reinforce the idea that course level guides are more valuable (and better used) than subject guides.
The final session I attended was a Hyde Park style discussion between Melody Burton, Chief Librarian, Okanagan Library, University of British Columbia and Kimberly Douglas, California Institute of Technology. Some key messages to take from this exchange:
- We need to be committed to transformational change, but it may be unlikely in our lifetimes;
- Move emphasis from reader services to author services:
- Start thinking like economists;
- The internet will go on surprising us;
- Be relevant;
- Initiate the change.
08 November 2011
Charleston Conference, Part 4
Friday morning started with an executives' roundtable, bringing together speakers from libraries and publishing. T. Scott Plutchak, director of the Lister Hill health sciences library at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, Paul Courant, Dean of Libraries, University of Michigan, and H. Frederick Dylla, CEO, American Insitute of Physics engaged in a platform discussion about the blurring boundaries between publishing and libraries, including contributions, comments and questions from the audience. This was followed by a conversation between Anne Kenney, University Librarian of Cornell and Kevin Guthrie, President of ITHAKA, facilitated by Greg Tananbaum of Anianet and ScholarNext. They discussed the major challenges for library collections and for publishers, including preservation issues, alumni access to electronic resources and how university presses and scholarly society publishers can work more closely with libraries.
I passed over the opportunity to hear a discussion of the legal issues concerning libraries (the final morning plenary session) - I thought this would probably have a very specific focus on the American legal context. My presentation was due to be one of the next lively lunch sessions and I thought I might find somewhere to look over my notes. Instead, I took a stroll around beautiful Charleston, which certainly helped me to feel less nervous. I'll blog about my presentation separately later.
The first of the concurrent afternoon sessions I attended was titled Triage in a digital age. I missed the first part of the session (wrapping things up after my own presentation) but I was interested in particular in the problem based approaches to staff technical services training. This included working through technical services problem scenarios, inviting to staff to suggest solutions and then being able to review their individual approaches with a mentor.
After this session, I went to another concurrent session presented by my supervisor Sheila Corrall of the University of Sheffield and Mike Sweet, Credo Reference about resource discovery systems and their potential role in promoting information literacy. This discussed the pros and cons of the concept of a "one stop information shop" and some of the different ways in which library content can be made more accessible to users in its most relevant context. For example, LibGuides enables the integration of library resources within user workflows. Integrating Credo Reference resources within web scale discovery systems will enable users to locate relevant, reliable reference information about topics entered in their searches, with these results displayed at the top of result lists.
The afternoon plenary session featured discussion about the future of online newspapers. The session was facilitated by Frederick Zarndt, CEO, Global Connexions and all three speakers - Deborah Cheney, Head, News and Microforms Library, Penn State, Chuck Palsho, President, Media Services, NewsBank, and Chris Cowan, VP Publishing, ProQuest - outlined the major challenges facing newspapers as technology creates more minute-by-minute news, less original reporting and community facilitation by news organisations. I was struck that all three felt that paywall models would prevail - I'm not sure whether this seems as convincing an argument in the UK context, where News International's experience of pay walls seems to have met with mixed results and where so much quality news content is freely available from the BBC. The Guardian's business model also suggests that there may be a future for free web-based news content provided by major newspapers, although this also supports the idea of news sites as facilitators of communities - I'm consistently impressed by the content in the Guardian's Social enterprise network, for example. Chris Cowan gave the full quotation from Stewart Brand (1984) - putting a famous phrase in its proper context:
Derek Law of the University of Strathclyde gave a very impressive summary of the conference so far - all the more impressive by being videocast from Scotland. A couple of really big take home messages from his comments were that librarians have perhaps got out of the habit of collective action - and need to rediscover that with some urgency, and that - although nothing is really free - free at the point of use for customers is crucial.
The final Friday concurrent session I attended looked at new economic models for e-books. Michael Porter from Library Renewal spoke about this project for developing new e-content models starting at the grassroots and guided by librarians. Eric Hellman of Gluejar spoke about the Gluejar project to use a funding model from US National Public Radio to enable individuals to fund open access to individual titles. Although it's an intriguing idea, it seems to be very much in the early stages of development, without much testing. I don't think any existing e-book vendors would move away from their existing sales models because of it, although it may help some self-published materials to reach a wider audience.
I passed over the opportunity to hear a discussion of the legal issues concerning libraries (the final morning plenary session) - I thought this would probably have a very specific focus on the American legal context. My presentation was due to be one of the next lively lunch sessions and I thought I might find somewhere to look over my notes. Instead, I took a stroll around beautiful Charleston, which certainly helped me to feel less nervous. I'll blog about my presentation separately later.
The first of the concurrent afternoon sessions I attended was titled Triage in a digital age. I missed the first part of the session (wrapping things up after my own presentation) but I was interested in particular in the problem based approaches to staff technical services training. This included working through technical services problem scenarios, inviting to staff to suggest solutions and then being able to review their individual approaches with a mentor.
After this session, I went to another concurrent session presented by my supervisor Sheila Corrall of the University of Sheffield and Mike Sweet, Credo Reference about resource discovery systems and their potential role in promoting information literacy. This discussed the pros and cons of the concept of a "one stop information shop" and some of the different ways in which library content can be made more accessible to users in its most relevant context. For example, LibGuides enables the integration of library resources within user workflows. Integrating Credo Reference resources within web scale discovery systems will enable users to locate relevant, reliable reference information about topics entered in their searches, with these results displayed at the top of result lists.
The afternoon plenary session featured discussion about the future of online newspapers. The session was facilitated by Frederick Zarndt, CEO, Global Connexions and all three speakers - Deborah Cheney, Head, News and Microforms Library, Penn State, Chuck Palsho, President, Media Services, NewsBank, and Chris Cowan, VP Publishing, ProQuest - outlined the major challenges facing newspapers as technology creates more minute-by-minute news, less original reporting and community facilitation by news organisations. I was struck that all three felt that paywall models would prevail - I'm not sure whether this seems as convincing an argument in the UK context, where News International's experience of pay walls seems to have met with mixed results and where so much quality news content is freely available from the BBC. The Guardian's business model also suggests that there may be a future for free web-based news content provided by major newspapers, although this also supports the idea of news sites as facilitators of communities - I'm consistently impressed by the content in the Guardian's Social enterprise network, for example. Chris Cowan gave the full quotation from Stewart Brand (1984) - putting a famous phrase in its proper context:
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.The full quotation and more of the story of the phrase is available here.
Derek Law of the University of Strathclyde gave a very impressive summary of the conference so far - all the more impressive by being videocast from Scotland. A couple of really big take home messages from his comments were that librarians have perhaps got out of the habit of collective action - and need to rediscover that with some urgency, and that - although nothing is really free - free at the point of use for customers is crucial.
The final Friday concurrent session I attended looked at new economic models for e-books. Michael Porter from Library Renewal spoke about this project for developing new e-content models starting at the grassroots and guided by librarians. Eric Hellman of Gluejar spoke about the Gluejar project to use a funding model from US National Public Radio to enable individuals to fund open access to individual titles. Although it's an intriguing idea, it seems to be very much in the early stages of development, without much testing. I don't think any existing e-book vendors would move away from their existing sales models because of it, although it may help some self-published materials to reach a wider audience.
07 November 2011
Charleston Conference, Part 3
Thursday afternoon saw the first of the lively lunch and concurrent sessions, meaning I had the difficult job of choosing between a very wide range of interesting and relevant sessions.
On Thursday afternoon I went to a Lively Lunch session led by Samuel Demas, Rick Lugg and Bob Kieft talking about the emotive issue of relegating materials to off-site storage or for removal. Three case studies showed the perils libraries encounter in this area and discussion was then opened up to the floor with members of the audience sharing their experiences in this difficult area. I think this might be a more contentious issue in American academic libraries than in the UK, where most university libraries have lacked comparable opportunities for expansion experienced in the US during the mid-twentieth century.
I then went to a session led by Joan Petit of Portland State University about locating good online collections of primary resources and informing library customers about these. UNESCO, The Digital Scriptorium and various Flickr library image collections were all suggested - it was great to hear the British Library's online content getting positive mentions in this session, too! An obvious resource to suggest for helping with this would have been the UK's Intute site. It's so disappointing that the funding for this resource has stopped, although it does seem like access will remain for the next couple of years, but without records being added or maintained.
Another concurrent session featured Anthony Watkinson from UCL, Fiona Murphy of Wiley-Blackwell and Linda Beebe of the NISO-NFAIS working group discussing issues in sharing research data. Fiona provided an overview of some of the reasons for, and barriers to, effective data sharing - in the context of the morning sessions, it was valuable to hear a publisher's perspective on this. Linda spoke about the issues relating to data contained in supplemental materials for journal articles - the definition of data used here (developed by the NSF) seemed significantly more inclusive than definitions used in earlier sessions. Case studies were suggested as a good way of helping librarians to get started on helping researchers with issues surrounding data, ideally from the very start of the process of planning for data collection.
Clifford Lynch and Lee Dirks led the afternoon plenary session, talking about Microsoft Academic Search Microsoft's free resource, and other tools which facilitate "open research", including Vivo ("Facebook for scientists"), Orcid which aims to resolve name ambiguities), Dataverse, Datacite, and Total Impact, which evaluates the impact of research in social media. A new tool, DuraCloud, was only formally launched last week, but provides mechanisms for backing up content in multiple online cloud computing systems (with a back-up back-up held offline).
The final session I attended on Thursday discussed the future of the collection development policy. This was led by Matt Torrence, Megan Sheffield and Audrey Powers of the University of South Florida. There was a lively discussion about the motivations and uses of policy documents - but I found it particularly interesting that the USF library has a LibGuides section devoted to collection development http://guides.lib.usf.edu/collection-development. The presentation from this session is available at http://guides.lib.usf.edu/futurecdpolicy.
On Thursday afternoon I went to a Lively Lunch session led by Samuel Demas, Rick Lugg and Bob Kieft talking about the emotive issue of relegating materials to off-site storage or for removal. Three case studies showed the perils libraries encounter in this area and discussion was then opened up to the floor with members of the audience sharing their experiences in this difficult area. I think this might be a more contentious issue in American academic libraries than in the UK, where most university libraries have lacked comparable opportunities for expansion experienced in the US during the mid-twentieth century.
I then went to a session led by Joan Petit of Portland State University about locating good online collections of primary resources and informing library customers about these. UNESCO, The Digital Scriptorium and various Flickr library image collections were all suggested - it was great to hear the British Library's online content getting positive mentions in this session, too! An obvious resource to suggest for helping with this would have been the UK's Intute site. It's so disappointing that the funding for this resource has stopped, although it does seem like access will remain for the next couple of years, but without records being added or maintained.
Another concurrent session featured Anthony Watkinson from UCL, Fiona Murphy of Wiley-Blackwell and Linda Beebe of the NISO-NFAIS working group discussing issues in sharing research data. Fiona provided an overview of some of the reasons for, and barriers to, effective data sharing - in the context of the morning sessions, it was valuable to hear a publisher's perspective on this. Linda spoke about the issues relating to data contained in supplemental materials for journal articles - the definition of data used here (developed by the NSF) seemed significantly more inclusive than definitions used in earlier sessions. Case studies were suggested as a good way of helping librarians to get started on helping researchers with issues surrounding data, ideally from the very start of the process of planning for data collection.
Clifford Lynch and Lee Dirks led the afternoon plenary session, talking about Microsoft Academic Search Microsoft's free resource, and other tools which facilitate "open research", including Vivo ("Facebook for scientists"), Orcid which aims to resolve name ambiguities), Dataverse, Datacite, and Total Impact, which evaluates the impact of research in social media. A new tool, DuraCloud, was only formally launched last week, but provides mechanisms for backing up content in multiple online cloud computing systems (with a back-up back-up held offline).
The final session I attended on Thursday discussed the future of the collection development policy. This was led by Matt Torrence, Megan Sheffield and Audrey Powers of the University of South Florida. There was a lively discussion about the motivations and uses of policy documents - but I found it particularly interesting that the USF library has a LibGuides section devoted to collection development http://guides.lib.usf.edu/collection-development. The presentation from this session is available at http://guides.lib.usf.edu/futurecdpolicy.
05 November 2011
Charleston Conference, Part 2
A lot of what I write in the next few posts will be principally descriptive, but I hope this will still be of some interest. There's been so much to take in at each session, I think serious reflection will take a little while longer. I hope I'm not misrepresenting any of the speakers arguments or the projects they discussed - if any speakers are reading this, please do let me know if I have!
Wednesday was preconference day. There were a range of events organised on the day to coincide with the start of the conference, in the same venues, but not part of the conference proper. I didn't register for any of the talks on Wednesday, but I did go along to the vendor showcase. This provided opportunities to find out more about the latest product developments relating to library collections, including about resource discovery systems and collection management services, and from journal publishers, e-book vendors and database suppliers. I was particularly struck by the move into e-book publishing by producers of other types of e-resources. For example, Project MUSE and JSTOR both have e-book collections due to launch next year.
Thursday saw the start of the main conference (at 7am, an early start at least partly mitigated by residual effects of coming to terms with the GMT-EST time difference). The morning plenary sessions began with a presentation by Michael Keller of Stanford University about linked data. This described the opportunities offered by semantic web developments to get away from the silo approach to information storage which has been a feature of many library systems. Linking open data about authors, papers, quotations and citations in a single place assists disambiguation. An example of how this can work can be seen in Freebase, to which Stanford's libraries have contributed information, on topic pages such as this one about Vincent Van Gogh. The report on which this presentation was based can be found at http://www.clir.org/pubs/archives/linked-data-survey based on a workshop held at Stanford in the summer.
The second presentation, by MacKenzie Smith of MIT, stayed with the theme of data. She discussed the importance of data sharing for research and some of the current difficulties in encouraging this. Interestingly, she described a key feature of data suitable for sharing as the prohibitively expensive cost of collecting them again or reproducing them. This might seem to exclude more types of data than would be case using more inclusive definitions, and seems to me to place a greater emphasis on what not to collect - in a way which may be familiar to librarians who face difficult decisions about withdrawing or deselecting materials or who specify exclusions in collection policy documents. The presentation advocated that librarians and publishers need to work together to be part of the data creation process - with publishers utilising existing peer-review structures to ensure quality control, and librarians both promoting data management tools and taking on a longer term archiving role to preserve access to data.
Mark Dimunation of the Library of Congress gave a presentation about "hidden collections" - special collections not included in routine library processes, or caught up in cataloguing backlogs. Although the topic has been discussed for at least a decade, limited progress has been made - including the establishment of a US hidden collections register. This talk picked up on some of the topics raised in the first session - especially about the limitations of a silo approach to collections. He argued persuasively that new formats will continue to challenge librarians for as long as we persist in separating them out. A Library of Congress report about bibliographic control was mentioned - I think this refers to this 2007 report.
The final Thursday morning session featured Robert Darnton of Harvard University Library, Rachel Frick of the Digital Library Federation and Sandford Thatcher of Pennsylvania State University Press talking about a recently announced initiative to develop a Digital Public Library of America, with an aim to launch this in 2013. This will aim to carry digitised content from books and AV materials in the public domain, but advocating appropriate legal methods - such as Extended Collective Licenses - to facilitate the inclusion of much more recent content (following the example of JSTOR's moving wall approach to negotiating digitisation arrangements with journal publishers). The idea seems ambitious (especially in difficult economic times, envisaging grassroots political organising to raise funds) but the scope of its ambition seemed well summed up by Darnton as a version of Google books in which interest in the public good prevails over commercial solutions. This is definitely a project to watch - it has already announced a collaboration with Europeana and its content will be available internationally as well as in the US. The Digital Library Federation also features news about this project.
Charleston Conference, Part 1
This week I've been attending the 31st annual Charleston Conference in South Carolina. This is probably the most significant annual gathering of librarians, publishers, vendors and others interested in collection development and management issues. In terms of numbers of attendees, it's probably comparable to CILIP's Umbrella conference (an annual conference for UK librarians) - but Charleston focuses just on collection issues.
I originally intended to blog day by day, but, frankly, the program for past few days has been so full (a 12 hour day on Thursday and an 11 hour day on Friday) I haven't managed to find the time. I'm going to try to catch up now with some accounts of the talks I've attended - for ease of reading, I'll split this over a number of different posts. I'll probably add more posts to this blog in the next few hours than I've added in the whole of the last couple of months!
I want to round off this post by saying that this is one of the most exciting things I've ever done - it's the first time I've been to the US, and simultaneously one of the most enjoyable and challenging conferences I've ever attended. I gave a presentation here on Friday and I'll blog a bit about that experience, too.
I originally intended to blog day by day, but, frankly, the program for past few days has been so full (a 12 hour day on Thursday and an 11 hour day on Friday) I haven't managed to find the time. I'm going to try to catch up now with some accounts of the talks I've attended - for ease of reading, I'll split this over a number of different posts. I'll probably add more posts to this blog in the next few hours than I've added in the whole of the last couple of months!
I want to round off this post by saying that this is one of the most exciting things I've ever done - it's the first time I've been to the US, and simultaneously one of the most enjoyable and challenging conferences I've ever attended. I gave a presentation here on Friday and I'll blog a bit about that experience, too.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)