Charleston Conference - Friday morning

First session was I Hear the Train a Comin'

The first speaker was Andrew Pace from North Carolina State University spoke on continuation strategies in a new ecosystem - patron technologies like ebooks, content ecosystems and ILS. Andrew has a blog, Hectic Pace. The second speaker was Peter Banks from Banks Publishing; his topic was "Everything I Know About Scholarly Publishing's Future I Learned from ITunes and he spoke on various business models for scholarly publishing. Ann Okerson from Yale spoke next on penguins, hedgehogs, and foxes as metaphors for types of users. Her main theme was letting users' real needs come first, not offering the latest Web 2.0 resource because it is new and cool. The final speaker was Isabella Hinds from Blackboard on transforming educational institutions. They recently surveyed 50 senior university administrators - the highest priority they listed was students. The drivers she saw were breaking down of course walls, the rise of learning outcomes, a revolution in digital content, and the need for a common user interface. She had some interesting statistics on Course Management Software (CMS) systems like Blackboard - 90% of the institutions surveyed have selected a standard CMS, SIS is integrated into 80% of these CMS systems, but libraries in only 25%. Questions from the audience included a plea to make the library's resources the default for instructors to select from when setting up a CMS course instead of making something like Questia or Google Scholar the default.

The next speaker was Matthew Bruccoli, the Emily Brown Jeffries Distinguised Professor Emeritus, University of South Carolina, who made an impassioned plea for books. He believes that the book as a printed artifact is what makes a library - a library without books is not a library and a scanned image is not a book. May well be true for some disciplines in literature or history but I wasn't convinced with respect to science and engineering.

The next panel was on Open Access - Beyond Declarations: What Steps Towards What Future. Mark Patterson from the Public Library of Science spoke in the network of literature and other data (e.g., PubMed Central with articles and links to data sets like the Genome Project) and text mining (going beyond mining titles and abstracts to mining the full text). He also discussed the upcoming PLOSOne, which will combine social software with articles so articles can generate comments and discussion. Dr. Astrid Wissenburg, from one of the UK Research Councils, spoke on the public funding of research perspective. She referenced a recent Baseline Report on analysis of data on scholarly journals publishing, which looks interesting. I missed the third speaker's presentation to make the next session.

Over lunch, I attended a hands-on demo of Endeavour's ERMS system. Seemed a good opportunity to compare with our own III ERMS. Have some ideas to talk about when I get back to the library. The session was in the College of Charleston's Addlestone Library, which is a nice-looking building with a large information commons area on the main floor. It was a nice walk over to the library on a beautiful sunny day.