At the Charleston Conference 2006

This year I am attending the Charleston Conference for the first time. This conference (in Charleston, SC) focuses on book and serials acquisition issues.

So far, I've run into 5 familiar faces - Joe Toth (who used to work at OSU), Michael Fosmire from Purdue, Cynthia Holt from George Washington University and Christine Orr from the American Institute of Physics (all active in SLA's PAM Division) and Sue Anderson from Eastern Washington University (also a member of the Orbis Cascades Alliance Electronic Resources Committee).

There are 1,019 registrants at this conference - much smaller than SLA's annual conference (which I've been attending for over a decade now), but much bigger than the Acquisitions Institute at Timberline Lodge, the other acquisition conference I've attended.

The conference started with a keynote address by Ray English from Oberlin College on the unintended consequences of serials prices and the open access movement. This talk was interesting and raised a lot of questions at the end.

David Lankes from Syracuse spoke next on Massive Scale Librarianship. Slides from this talk are on his website. The most interesting idea I got from this talk was the concept of participating librarianship, which included the ideas of knowledge being created through conversations and the need to handle large scale data at the conversation level.

Michael Pelikan from Penn State gave an entertaining talk with many quotes from F. W. Lancaster on "After the Dinosaur Killer: Adaptation and Survival."

The conference organizers then put on a funny skit "Captain Acronym meets Bureaucracy Babe" on ERMs promising magic solutions.

The morning ended with presentations by Stanley Wilder (University of Rochester) on their C4 interface, Andrew Pace (NC State) on their Endeca catalog interface and Paul Miller (Talis) on the latest developments in Library 2.0.

Off to lunch now.