Charleston Conference

I also attended the 30th annual Charleston Conference and found it very helpful in terms of my new role of managing our electronic subscriptions for the Excelsior College. I attended a negotiating with vendors preconference on Wednesday that brought together people with different perspectives in dealing with licensing, which made for a balanced and insightful view on how to best negotiate these contracts.

The conference itself was jam-packed and I attended over 20 sessions! Some of my favorites included:

• Let them Eat Everything…Embracing a Patron-Driven Future, Rick Anderson, University of Utah. Thought-provoking point: Libraries do fundamentally crazy things when we have no options. We get good at these things and then they become core services? ex. ILL, Big Deals, reference & instruction (like telling 25 fishermen to fish for 20,000 fish)
  
• Who Do we Trust? Meaning of Brand in Scholarly Publishing and Academic Librarianship, Kent Anderson, Dean Smith (Project Muse), Hazel Woodard, Allen Renear (Univ Of Illinois Lib School)- Brand is interesting, we all trust the brand, but why? Because it represents something else-the process. However, how far should we stretch this? ex. Nature communications.
• Open Textbook Models: View from the Library, Greg Rascke NC State. Discussed FlatWorld and their business model; Then, NC State's library policy to purchase one of every required textbook.
• Executive Roundtable Q& A- Y.S. Chi, Elsevier and Kent Anderson. A question focused on how publishers are dealing with supplemental data, how much should go online and how should it be posted?
• What can our Readers Teach us? John Sack, Associate Director for Highwire Press Thinking outside the box- Readers want information and we give them a container (books, articles, journals, etc.) and they have to unpack them. *If we can find what users want, we can get out of the box.

I have tons of notes and additional information, so please contact me if you are interested!