Charleston Conference - Thursday afternoon

Shared a table at lunch with some folks from Better World Books, which buys unwanted gift books, and Glenda Lammers from OCLC, who is responsible for Worldcat Collection Analysis. We had a nice chat describing Conspectus and collection assessment to the Better World Books folks.

After lunch, I attended an interesting session by librarians at the University of Denver and the University of Colorado, Boulder, regarding their pilot cooperative collection development approval plan. Planning and implementing 4 approval plans (Economics, Mathematics, Political Science and Religion) for 8 of the 24 CARL libraries took approximately 9 months, using Spectra Dimension to analyze the libraries’ collections - overlap, usage, total number of titles. The first books under the new profiles began arriving last month. They are planning on doing a lot of assessment, using both qualitative and quantitative measures.

I then attended a session on the new Resources for College Libraries, the new edition of Books for College Libraries. This was an overview of the process used to develop the new lists of core titles in 58 subject areas. More information is available at http://www.RCLInfo.net.

The final session of the day was a product development session. This one was for Blackwell’s new Blackwell Reference Online, which is launching at the end of this month. It is a 300 reference title collection, available as one big package or 6 subject collections. To start, they are only doing social science, humanities and business titles. Science titles will be available later, beginning with medical titles. We discussed pricing models, the interface, printing options, citations to the resources, the need to be able to select individual titles rather than packages, and Z39.50 and OpenURL compliance. Trials will be available beginning in November. In subjects covered, there appears to be considerable overlap with Oxford Reference Online.

This is a good conference for meeting people. Ran into more familiar faces: Pam Rebarcak (we used to work together at Iowa State University), Nina Bakkalbasi from Yale, Doug LaFrenier & Christine Orr from the American Institute of Physics, Jerry Cowhig & Steve Moss from the Institute of Physics (all PAM members), Sue Anderson from Eastern Washington University, Jack Levine from Reed College (Orbis Cascades librarians). I’ve also chatted with collection development and acquisition librarians from CalTech, Eli Lilly and Company, Middle Tennessee State University, Penn State University, Plymouth State University, University of Alabama Birmingham, University of Georgia, University of Houston, University of Southern Indiana, and vendors from Ambassador Books & Media, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, Blackwell Publishing, Coutts Library Services, and the Royal Society of Chemistry.