Charleston Conference XXX

I attended the 30th Charleston Conference this past week. The conference was very heavy on acquisitions, patron driven decisions and models, and electronic books. Attendance included a lot of publishers, and a good opportunity to meet with software vendors, such as Ebsco and OCLC. I presented:
Sue Woodson also gave an excellent plenary session talk.

Three things of note I want to touch on, and then get into some questions that have been rolling around in my head, and are appropriate maybe to write down.

Printing on demand - The Espresso Book Machine is a cool product by OnDemandBooks. Imagine no longer purchasing titles according to an approval plan, and printing only the books that users want, in a matter of minutes per book, right in your library. Rick Anderson, of University of Utah, was singing the praises of this EBM in their library. Not a new concept, but been put through its paces for a few years now.

KBART - NISO working group to fix the weakest link in the metadata supply chain from publishers to link resolver knowledgebase. KBART has created a universally acceptable holdings data format to improve the OpenURL KB metadata supply chain. This group made its recommendation in january 2010 and has gotten some critical mass of publishers to take note. Information on KBART is available here.

User behavior - John Sack reported on an interesting user study conducted by Highwire. Very telling (or rather confirming) data on how users research (what tools they use and what habits), and how readers behave. Researchers are not using library catalogs or publishers web sites. Readers are not using e-books, many aren't even reading on the screen (printing PDFs and reading on paper).

Besides these three points, there were a handful of plenary sessions that were speculative towards the future of libraries. It is hard to predict the future. But, libraries have been evolving for decades, and will continue to evolve. The librarian will need to evolve too; library staff will need to take on different roles as libraries are going to shift their focus from collecting to providing service.

Some of these sessions were very thought provoking, and lead me to ask some questions that I did not hear from any of the speakers:

In the library, should we continue to focus efforts on description and discovery of non-unique material? If no one is coming to library search, should we continue to focus all our attention on providing a discovery interface?

I wonder if our time would be well spent if we focused on providing persistent, RESTful URLs to our content, and continued to improve our rich set of services related to known items (ie. FindIt). In this way, our content could be consistently crawled, and exposed for indexing by more mainstream external indexes.

Should we be focusing on the browser environment, pushing Firefox, Chrome, and IE extensions like libX? These extensions would guide users from the open web to known item services and through authentication.

Should we focus on authentication and focus on providing access instead of discovery? There is work that still needs to be done to publishers' interfaces to help guide users from the open web to licensed material. Most users are finding links to articles from search engines, not through a library search interface.

Can we assume that google, and the like, will provide better search of content than we can ourselves?

In what ways can we put technology to better use to automate backend workflows? More automated knowledgebase management? Better integration of ILL licensing terms from our licensing agreements to our ILL applications? More automated workflow in the approval process, such that two separate financial systems don't need to be maintained?

I will stop speculating ... for now