The Charleston Conference is almost over. Several of the presentations were excellent. It was great to see old friends and to make new ones. This conference used to have about 400-500 people in attendance; it has grown to over 1100. It seems like it was bursting at the seems, but people had a good time and there was a wide array of program choices.
Yesterday, Four CEOs talked about the greatest challenges to the scholarly communications. They talked about developing new business models, the rise in social networks and communications, and consumerism in China. China, they said, will have a huge impact, and is already having a huge impact, on scholarly communications output. They also talked about the Espresso book machine http://www.ondemandbooks.com/ which they predict will have a huge impact on scholarly publishing. Inexpensively created books, on demand.
Then Chris Matz from Christian Brothers College did a wonderful session about using the libraries annual report as an outreach tool for faculty. While he was at the University of Memphis, he wrote 38 different annual reports, each tailored to a specific discipline. I thought he was very industrious, creative, and probably pretty tired since he did that all in 7 months. He cited an article by our very own Bernadette Lear (Tis Better to be Brief than Tedious)...way to go, Bernadette.
This morning Ann Okerson moderated an excellent panel discussion on "What Do Users Want". Lucinda Covert Vail talked about the mechanism they went through at NYU to gather information about the "primitives" -- basic process of faculty and grad student research through surveys, focus groups, and interviews with faculty in order to discover their research process so that the library could discover ways in which it could best meet their needs. Cecily Marcus, the CLIR Postdoc Fellow at Minnesota talked about the new library portal geared to assist undergraduates.
Our talk was this afternoon comparing the approval plans of two large ARL libraries (Penn State and the Univ. of Illinois.) We looked at cost/use by publisher and subject and drew some conclusions. Almost 70% of the books purchased at Penn State and 62% of the books purchased at UIUC circulated at least once in an up to two year period. We have some great data that i'll post soon. We view this as a starting point for collections assessment and we have three or four more studies we either want to do together with Illinois or along. Bob Alan from Penn State and Lynn Wiley, Leslie Rios, and Tina Chrzastowski from Illinois worked on this with me. It was so much fun and we got some great comments.
There were a few other programs that I attended and the conference will continue through tomorrow (I leave about noon.) It was great seeing two of my ARL fellow colleagues (Stanley Wilder and Steve Smith) and we went out for a beer and caught up on what each other was doing.
If you ever get a chance to come to Charleston, I'd highly recommend it. It's a lovely city and you never know who you'll see here. I shook John Edward's hand at the Farmer's Market here once upon a time.