Charleston Conference presentation

I've finally got around to uploading a version of my presentation from the Charleston Conference to SlideShare - it's embedded below.

Charleston Conference 2012: part 6

This should be my final Charleston Conference post for 2012, about the final half-day of presentations, Saturday 10 November. After that, the sun set on the conference for another year.

On Saturday morning, I attended the "Long arm of the law" session. Winston Tabb (Dean of Libraries and Museums, The Johns Hopkins University) described IFLA's work on developing an international approach to copyright limitations and exceptions, charting some of the national variations in library exceptions (or lack of them) in different countries. In particular, Tabb discussed IFLA's recent recommendations (July 2012) for a Treaty on Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives (TLIB). Bill Hannay of the law firm Schiff Hardin then provided an overview of recent legal cases regarding publishers, book sales, authors and universities. Brilliantly, two of the cases discussed (USA vs Apple and Kirtsaeng vs Wiley) were summarised in song! Nancy Weiss from the Institute of Museum and Library Services explored further legal issues for libraries and museums including the implications of the Golan vs Holder case and the Authors' Guild vs Hathi Trust case, regarding digitization of published works to make them accessible to people with visual impairments. All these cases either have been or are going to be decided by the US Supreme court and it's difficult to know how relevant the cases would be specifically in a UK context, but of course the global reach of organisations such as Apple, Amazon, Google and the Hathi Trust does mean these judgements are bound to have international ramifications.

Then it was time for my 45 minute innovation session "Exploring concepts of 'collection' in the digital world". I was very pleased to see quite a large audience (around 25-30 people). I spoke for around 35 minutes, summarising some of my interview findings and a few very initial results from a survey I conducted over the summer and early autumn. The main part of the presentation explored ideas of collection-as-thing, collection-as-access, and collection-as-process. Paradoxically, I think that in some respects I tried to say too much and in other ways I probably didn't quite say enough about my findings. There was a really useful and interesting discussion after my presentation and I'm very grateful to all the audience members for their contributions. The major message which I've taken away from this discussion is to think more about immediacy, peripherality and convenience when thinking about 'collection'.

The morning concluded with a lively Hyde Park style debate, focused on the controversial proposition that "the traditional research library is dead". The motion was proposed by Rick Anderson (Interim Dean, Marriott Library, University of Utah) and opposed by Derek Law (University of Strathclyde). The debating style was robust and humorous, but ultimately focused on serious points which define the changing nature of library and information services. I thought both speakers made useful points, whether about the importance of library as space, the implications of the ending of a tradition in which information was trapped in physical objects, and that "uniqueness is not the same as vitality" (Rick Anderson), or about the continuing significance of the preservation role of libraries (Derek Law). In the end, the proposition carried the day, with a fairly evenly split initial poll (52% yes and 48% no) converted to a significant majority for the proposition (65% yes, 35% no). It seems the sun may be setting on more than a conference...

Charleston Conference 2012: part 5

On the afternoon of Friday 9 November, I attended a lively lunch session about inter-consortial licensing. This discussion session invloved Ann Okerson of the Center for Research Libraries and Tom Sanville of LYRASIS. Tom suggested that "'wide' deals" between consortia could represent the best deals available for subscribing to e-resources. A range of examples were cited including inter-consortial licensing efforts for Gale's 19th Century Online collection and Bloomsbury's Churchill Archive. However, other projects such as the Knowledge Exchange project seem to be "in hiatus".

Following this, I attended a packed concurrent session addressing the question "Does format matter? Comparing usage of E-books and P-books". Michael Levine-Clark was presenting and described a really interesting comparative study of the use of e-books and printed books from Duke University Press. What makes this study so fascinating is that it was possible to compare use of e- and p- copies of the same titles. The study raised really intriguing questions, such as what constitutes use in relation to print books and how e-book usage figures can be compared with print use. A big issue in gathering the data related to multiple ISBNs - and the presenter gave a convincing plea for better standardization of these (a partial solution which was suggested was using a 9-digit ISBN taken from the core of the 10- or 13-digit versions). The COUNTER data showed that 36.7% of the e-books were used, compared to 66% of the print books, with nearly 39% of the 841 texts which were available as both electronic and print versions being used in both formats. Materials used in both formats seemed to be used at a higher than average rate, leading the presenter to conclude by posing the question "does this mean that people's preference is for good content, not format?"

For the second afternoon concurrent session, I attended a presentation about developing collaborative collections in the cloud. Aisha Harvey of Duke University Library gave an overview of interlibrary lending schemes and discussed recent moves by the Triangle Research Libraries Network to develop new initiatives in resource sharing as part of its Beyond Print initiative. Lars Meyer of Emory University described a shared print repository with Georgia Tech, focusing on the unique holding strengths of each library's collections and providing an opportunity for the partners to deduplicate their collections. Finally, Chuck Spornick of Emory University described a collaborative approach to developing future collections in Biomedical Engineering.

Ann Okerson of the Center for Research Libraries gave the first afternoon plenary session about SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics). Work on coalition-building for this project has been led by CERN and aims to redirect funding which would have been spent on journal subscriptions to funding peer review based on nations' shares of publications in the field of high energy physics. The journals funded in this way would then make their content available on an open access basis. The project is due to go live at the start of 2014, but CERN will establish its own repository next year.

The second afternoon plenary session was a discussion of "Find > Search", featuring five panellists: Majorie Hlava (Access Innovations), Elisabeth Leonard (Sage), Meg White (Rittenhouse), Stanley Wilder (University of North Carolina Charlotte) and Elizabeth Willingham (Silverchair). All offered their perspectives on how their organisations help users to find more effectively, with less searching. For me, a key message in this discussion was "find consensus, pool resources and do what works".

The final session I attended on Friday afternoon was a presentation about the role of patron driven acquisitions in a research library. Both presenters - Thomas Teper and Lynn Wiley - were from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and they described how central a patron driven approach to collection development has been in libraries. Teper cited some interesting figures (I think based on the local collection at UIUC) suggesting that in the 1930s as much as 80% of material selection was done by academic staff; in the 1970s the majority was done by librarians. Lynn described a range of initatives:

• a consortial pilot program of PDA for print purchasing (2009);
• a test of PDA for e-books (2010);
• a local PDA system which provided customer access to subject selector records from the library's approval plan supplier (2011);
• a new consortial program beginning February 2012;
• a very new e-book PDA system which began in late October 2012.

This provides a rich set of data about comparative approaches to PDA, although the complexity of the combination of methods used seems to make it slightly difficult to draw clear conclusions about the comparative strengths of PDA versus library subject selector approaches.

Charleston Conference 2012: part 4

I'm back in Sheffield now, but still catching up on my posts from the Charleston Conference (7-10 November), which might take me a while. In the meantime, there is a more complete official blog about the conference on the Against the Grain website.

Friday 9 November began with Kristin Eschenfelder's presentation about research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to explore what e-resource licences say about perpetual access, interlibrary loan provision and scholarly sharing. Kristin reported on two content analysis studies of a single dataset of 224 licence contracts from 2000-2009, obtained in 2009 by a team led by Ted Bergstrom at the University of California Santa Barbara, using state freedom of information legislation to request the documents from state universities. There's a summary of some of the controversy and legal action which accompanied this initial data gathering process on Ted Bergstrom's website. The first study examined all 224 the licences for content regarding interlibrary loan, document supply and scholarly sharing and the second study, conducted by Mei Zhang (PhD student), examined 72 licences for content relating to the provision of perpetual access to e-resources. In the perpetual access study, it appears that most licences do mention perpetual access, with an increasing emphasis on library perpetual access and a slightly declining role for publisher perpetual access - surprisingly, Portico was seldom mentioned. Key findings from the study on ILL and scholarly sharing included:

• 55% of licences acknowledge scholarly sharing (this actually seemed like quite a high proportion to me);
• 60% allow secure e-delivery of their material for document supply services;
• 79% require libraries to have print copies in order to provide copies of their materials through document delivery services;

The presenter acknowledged the limitations of dealing with data which is at least three years old and in some cases 12 years old - future work will aim to gather more recent copies of licences.

The second morning plenary session was a lively discussion on the relationships between provosts (I think this is a post broadly equivalent to UK university vice chancellors) and librarians. J. Bradley Creed from Sandford university described librarians as indispensible in navigating information and central to the university mission. Jose-Marie Griffiths from Bryant University outlined some of the broad challenges facing universities - from the economy, technology, competition (including international competition for students), geopolitical changes. She talked about specific library roles in providing open access, open data and managing institutional repositories. I also thought it was interesting that she mentioned the role of the library in serving non-academic readers. The core message here was one of interdependence and the importance of innovation. Jim O'Donnell (formerly Provost of Georgetown University (2002-2012)) echoed some of these points - particularly about the importance of Big Data, and how library data can be used to tell university administrators new things about faculties and departments (not just about the library).

This was followed by presentations discussing the role of the academic press in the 21st century. Douglas Armato of the University of Minnesota Press gave a very engaging presentation about the history of the university press. I also liked his characterization of an academic press as a place where "money and mission [are] equally on our minds". To me, this seems like a quintessential description of a social enterprise, an idea echoed by Armato's use of the analogy of Bailey Building and Loan (from It's a Wonderful Life), a comparison which is also popular with many writers on social enterprise. One big question posed by this presentation was whether libraries and university presses are on a shared path of "co-evolution or co-extinction" and Douglas emphasized the importance of moving away from closed silo structures towards more open database structures. Alison Mudditt of University of California Press picked up on some of these ideas in her presentation - one thing which stood out for me was a quotation from the UCal Press editorial committee statement from 1938 outlining the obligation of the press to provide academic publications for "the whole world of educated men" - not just people in academic institutions (and presumably meaning educated women, too...).

The final morning session was a brief update by Emily Gore on the progress of the Digital Public Library of America project. One of the things which I found really interesting was the emphasis on the DPLA community, demonstrated by the use of a platform geared towards promoting participation ("WE are the DPLA"). It's obviously a massive project with global implications, but at the same time, resources are being committed to support locally hosted community outreach initiatives. The DPLA will also be collaborating with Europeana to create an online exhibition about migration from Europe to America.

Charleston Conference 2012: part 3

In the afternoon, I attended a lively lunch session by Billy Kane of Wake Forest University about providing textbooks to undergraduate students. The session gave an overview of some of the problems associated with these types of materials, including their unpopularity with students, the fact that they are expensive for students to buy, and the limited success of a range of alternative methods of delivering relevant content, such as course reserves or electronic versions. The proposal at the core of this presentation was that students should be offered an 'All you can eat' textbook purchase plan - like a meal plan - potentially priced at around $500 per semester. The most surprising thing for me was the extent to which textbook purchases are separated from core library materials budgets in US academic libraries. It was interesting to hear that the campus book shop seems to have a much greater significance as part of the university information landscape than might be the case in the UK. I also wonder whether UK academics are as likely to teach from one specific textbook (although of course this varies depending on the subject area) - certainly, my impression generally is that UK academics are more likely to want to mix and match content from different texts and to provide details of a range of alternative texts. Finally, although I think the challenges of needing multiple copies of any core course materials apply equally in the UK and the US, I think that students in the UK might be more likely to expect these texts to be provided by their library.

The first afternoon concurrent session which I attended included presentations by Hazel Woodward and Frances Pinter discussing Knowledge Unlatched. This is a UK based Community Interest Company (it's a social enterprise!) which aims to leverage collaborative purchasing by libraries to open up access to academic publications. This is based on an experiment by Bloomsbury Academic to deliver open access content. The new funding model outlined involves publishers offering scholarly titles via Knowledge Unlatched in advance of publication; libraries interested in acquiring the title commit to paying their share of a fixed title fee and once the title fee is reached, a basic HTML version of the text becomes accessible to anyone under an open content licence, and libraries can purchase copies of the titles as books (print or electronic) for a reduced price. The key potential advantages of this system include:

• For publishers - reducing the risks associated with publication;
• For libraries - purchasing costs less than on a unit-based model, contributes to connecting scholars globally and assists in furthering the development of open access;
• For readers - potentially anyone can access the content of these scholarly texts.

A pilot is planned for 2013 focusing on humanities and social science titles. It sounds very ambitious, but I think it's an interesting innovation and represents a promising departure from more conventional purchasing models.

The second afternoon concurrent session which I attended described the three-year LibValue project undertaken at the University of Tennessee and the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. The project examined the changes in people's use of library resources over 3 years, including how academic staff used collections to support their teaching and showing the imporvements experienced following a series of workshops delivered by library staff.

Returning to the main conference room, the Charleston Players delivered a series of entertaining skits with characters as varied as the 21st century reference librarian and a 3,000 year old bookseller! This was followed by a panel discussion on innovation moderated by Greg Tananbaum of ScholarNext and including Peter Binfield of PeerJ and Timo Hannay of Digital Science. For me, the main messages here were about the role of libraries in fostering innovation; the importance of planning today for our future information infrastructure; and the impact of the dramatic rise in open access journal publications (and the variety of publishing models which might deliver them).

The final Thursday session which I attended discussed the value chain of scholarly communication, including the roles of publishers, abstracting and indexing databases, resource discovery systems and libraries. I think that the core messages for libraries were about the need for new types of skills needed for new types of work, the opportunities to use new indicators to match content to users more effectively and to facilitate user customization of content, and the importance of working together with other partners in the scholarly communication chain to establish industry standards for interoperability and metadata.

Charleston Conference 2012: part 2

The main part of the Charleston Conference began today with two fascinating morning plenary sessions. Annette Thomas of Macmillan talked about a publisher's role in making science more effective. Interestingly, as one of the questioners pointed out, a number of the resources she described such as ReadCube 1DegreeBio or labguru are pieces of software, rather than anything resembling traditional published content. Altmetrics (alternative metrics) - the focus of yesterday's preconference - were also discussed, including how they can use mainstream and social media mentions to evaluate article impact now (rather than in several years, when citations have had chance to emerge).

Anurag Acharya from Google Scholar set out a bold ambition "everyone must be able to find everything". He focused particularly on describing approaches to overcoming the access barrier which limits the ability to link through to many items found in a search (even if the relevant library has a subscription) including:

• Link resolvers - popular in the UK and US but less so elsewhere;
• Libraries making case-by-case approaches to publishers to allow access;
• Consortia making requests to publishers on behalf of their members;
• An opt out system, allowing libraries to remove themselves.

An interesting point was that many journals provide public access to archive articles, but that this is often not promoted effectively. Anurag also described initiatives to provide access to electronic content in developing countries including:

• HighWire Press;
• HINARI (Access to Research in Health Programme), AGORA (Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture), OARE (Online Access to Research in the Environment);
• JSTOR Africa Access Initiative;
• INASP PERii (International Network for the Availability of Scholarly Publications Programme for the Enhancement of Research Information).

Indexing repository content more effectively would also provide better access to preprints of articles.

In the next plenary session, three different innovative approaches to publishing were described. Mark Coker of SmashWords described benefits of online self-publishing. Eric Hillman of Gluejar described the Unglue.it project which uses a crowd-funding model to raise pledges of donations sufficient to purchase rights for in-copyright (but out of print) texts, in order to digitise the content and make it freely available to everyone under a Creative Commons license. Rush Miller of the University of Pittsburgh described library involvement in the publishing process, using Open Journal Software to safeguard at risk peer-reviewed journals, and now moving into digital monograph publishing using Open Monograph Press.

The final morning plenary session featured Peter Brantley of the BookServer Project at the Internet Archive and Mike Shatzkin of The Idea Logical Company, discussing the future of e-book acquisitions. Peter emphasized that "simple works best" when it comes to e-book delivery, whilst Mike gave an overview of a trade publisher's perspective of the development of e-books. I think he made important points about the extent to which most readers will continue to want an "immersive reading experience" - essentially a digitized version of a printed book (or, indeed, a printed book itself) - rather than looking for lots of additional multimedia content in their e-books. He also discussed some of the ways in which enhanced content would be beneficial - such as providing the opportunity to retain and preserve richer contextual and background materials which chart an author's creative writing processes, or by adding video content to non-fiction or instructional publications (gardening books, for example).

There's much more to come! (Including pictures, which I'll upload when I'm back in the UK.)

[This post was amended on 17 November 2012 to include an additional paragraph about the final morning plenary session and a photo of the main conference hotel.]

Charleston Conference 2012: part 1

Yesterday I attended the preconference day in Charleston. The 32nd Charleston Conference proper started today, but yesterday provided an opportunity to meet publishers and suppliers during the vendor showcase and to participate in preconference meetings. I went along to an afternoon meeting 'COUNTER at 10: Evolving measures of journal impact, value and utility'. In this session, moderated by Carol Tenopir (University of Tennessee) five speakers - Paul Wouters (University of Leiden); Hazel Woodward (Co-chair Usage Factor Project); Richard Cave (PLoS); Mayur Amin (Elsevier); Ellen Rotenberg (Science and IP Business of Thomson Reuters) offered a range of perspectives on new forms of metrics for evaluating research. This included author or institution metrics, as well as more traditional article-level metrics such as citation counts.

The first two presentations seemed particularly interesting. Paul Wouters provided a good overview of the issues involved in developing new ways of measuring impact, outlining three criteria for tools:

• Scalable;
• Transparent data management;
• Allow for normalisation - should be usable across the full range of subject areas;

He discussed findings from the study: Wouters, P. and Costas, R. (2012). Users, Narcissism and Control: Tracking the Impact of Scholarly Publications in the 21st Century. Utrecht: SURFfoundation. This compared a number of approaches to new metrics and highlighted a few promising tools:

• F1000;
• Microsoft Academic - "to our own surprise";
• Total Impact - now ImpactStory - which allows users to build pictures of impact from diverse sources, including social media;
• PLOS ONE - which was discussed by Richard Cave in more detail later in the session<;/li>
• Google Scholar - although it lacks transparency about its coverage.

Hazel Woodward discussed the Usage Factor project, suggesting that journal usage statistics can complement impact factor measures - providing very different information. A draft code of practice for usage factors has already been released with a view to testing the methodology in 2013.

I'll try to post links to all these presentations when they become available.

Blogging about research and visiting Pittsburgh

This week I'm in the USA, attending the 32nd Charleston Conference. On the way to South Carolina, I spent a few days in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. On Monday, I visited the University of Pittsburgh's School of Information Sciences. This was a really valuable opportunity to get an insight into the US approach to doctoral studies. The US PhD course seems to have a much greater focus on equipping students with the skills they need to become faculty members. The final thesis or dissertation only occupies around one year to eighteen months, rather than being the focus of the full three or four years of study, as it is in the UK.

In the afternoon I facilitated a discussion session about blogging for research. I gave a brief presentation, which included talking about three blogs created and maintained by members of the University of Sheffield's iSchool. I also discussed my own experience of blogging including the benefits of maintaining this blog, such as:

• Popular posts about events which I've attended - sharing experiences which may be relevant and of interest to other people, but which not everyone would have the opportunity to attend;
• Acting as an informal record of the progress of my research and a place where I can embed resources such as presentations or documents;
• Leading to contacts from people interested in my research, either through comments on the blog or by email;
• Providing further information about my research for research participants or potential participants;
• Giving a global dimension to my research, with a significant number of blog visitors being based outside the UK;

I also talked about some of the challenges and limitations I've experienced, including:

• My lack of integration of the blog with other social media tools;
• The somewhat sporadic nature of my postings and the challenge of finding time to post;
• A relatively small number of comments - I'm aware I could do much more to encourage discussion here;
• Ethical issues and issues relating to prior publication - how much can I say about my research findings here on the blog and how much do I want to save for journal articles or conference papers?

The presentation was followed by a lively discussion about the pros anc cons of blogging about research and encouraged me to resolve to blog more frequently.

Many thanks to everyone at the University of Pittsburgh iSchool for giving me such a warm welcome!