Charleston Conference - Friday afternoon

The next session I went to was "Scatter and Decay: E-Journal Usage Patterns". Carol Tenopir and Gayle Baker from the University of Tennessee and David Nicholas from University College London spoke on some of the results they obtained from their Maxdata project, which compared various statistics sources - data logs on scholarly journal usage at 4 OhioLink libraries, surveys of faculty and students at the University of Tennessee, the OhioLink libraries and 2 Australian universities, and COUNTER reports from vendors at the University of Tennessee. They have published an article of some of their findings in the November 2006 JASIST - "Article decay in the digital environment: An analysis of usage of OhioLINK by date of publication, employing deep log methods."

"Less Searching, More Finding: The Future of Information Retrieval" was the next session I attended. William Mischo of UIUC spoke on what we know about how end users search, including the principle of least effort and satisficing results. Jay Datema, Library Journal Technology Editor and the LJ Tech Blog talked about SDI, Alerts, RSS/OPML, recommender systems and searching in context. Marydee Ojala, Editor of Online, spoke about the difference of searching(what information professionals love to do) and finding (what users want to do) and orchestrating findability.

The last session of the day was on collecting fugitive literature. Karen Schmidt, Wendy Shellane, and David Vess of UIUC spoke about their project using a webcrawler to collect and archive information from blogs and websites produced by hate groups in the Midwest, using information from the Southern Poverty Law Center to identify the groups for the project. An interesting discussion of the challenges and ethics of this sort of archiving.

Dinner was with a few friends at Cru Cafe, a very nice restaurant in an old house on Pinckney St. We ate on the veranda. I had an excellent pork tenderloin and shared a flourless chocolate torte.