2013 Charleston Conference

Overflow seating available in the Gold Ballroom and Colonial Ballroom

VIDEO

The best libraries were never simply buyers and warehouses for information, but something more, centered around synthesis and access and creativity. As the information ecosystem has shifted, forcing our attention to the operational side of How We Manage Information, some of us have lost sight of that. We hand over our shrinking resources to prominent for-profit publishers and vendors because it's How The System Works, without considering what our role in that system is, has been, and might be. It's time to remind everyone that the power of libraries lies not in our passivity but in our action, and reclaim and redefine our roles within it. Drawing on her experiences with the American Chemical Society, faculty perceptions of scholarship and libraries, and local and national conversations about library acquisitions, Jenica Rogers will share her vision of what librarians' rights and responsibilities are and can be in the postdigital information economy.

VIDEO

In this first large scale study of the effect of discovery systems on electronic resource usage, the authors present initial findings on how these systems alter online journal usage by academic library researchers. The study examines usage of content hosted by four major academic journal publishers at 24 libraries that have implemented one of the major discovery systems, EBSCO's EDS, Ex Libris' Primo, OCLC's Worldcat Local, or SerialsSolutions’ Summon.  A statistically rigorous comparison of COUNTER-compliant journal usage at each library from the 12 months before and after implementation will determine the degree to which usage rises or falls after discovery tool implementation and address rumors that discovery tools differ in their impact on electronic resource usage.

Vicky Speck ABC-CLIO Leadership Award is awarded every year to a leader in the Charleston Conference who has made a lasting contribution to the Conference’s mission. We have given the award to five people so far – Anthony Watkinson (2006), Jack Montgomery (2007), Beth Bernhardt (2008), Heather Miller (2009), Eleanor Cook (2010), Glenda Alvin (2011), and Ramune Kubilius (2012).

VIDEO

Since the founding of the Royal Society in the 1660s and with the development of disciplinary fields in the later 19th century, scholarly societies have established themselves as mediators of the professional lives of faculty and as vital components of the ecology of scholarly communication. In their interactions with libraries, societies may appear primarily as publishers of newsletters, books, reports, journals, and indexes and databases, but they also promote the creation and diffusion of knowledge by serving as hubs for professional activity, contributors to the making of public policy and opinion, providers of education, representatives of the interests of their members, and, more generally, shapers of the institutions and purposes of higher education.

Society operations and education or outreach programs depend to varying degrees on revenues from publishing programs and membership dues. Today, however, changing demographics and membership decline, the academic job market, the weakening of library budgets, new modes of publishing and media for establishing scholarly reputation, and the importance of making scholarship available to a broader audience than those who can afford to purchase it challenge traditional society roles and especially the business models that have supported those roles .

Panelists will address the ways in which scholarly societies are addressing the current information environment and how societies are adjusting programs and roles as they continue to build and maintain communities of scholars and promote the interests of teaching, learning, and research.

VIDEO

In the spirit of "anything worth doing is worth doing superficially" John Dove will give us, in classic "pecha kucha" style, a presentation on the theme of this year's conference.   There will be 20 slides and they are automatically progressed every twenty seconds.  John presented his first pecha kucha inspired presentation at the 13th Fiesole Collection Development Retreat in St. Petersburg, Russia in May of 2011.   Ever since the Charleston Conference has included "Shotgun" sessions of 6 minute 40 second presentations of which there are several scheduled throughout the conference. 

VIDEO

Meg White (intro slides)
Rick Anderson (slides)
Lynn Sutton (slides)
Meredith Schwartz (slides)

Massive Open Online Courses are disrupting the traditional view of learning and the academy.  Using technology, high-quality courses taught by some of the brightest minds are now available to unprecedented numbers of students.   The university now has the potential to be in the computer.  And, if the university is truly in the computer, what does that mean for the library? 

In this plenary session, Meredith Schwartz from Library Journal will share highlights from her article Massive Open Opportunity: Supporting MOOCs in Public and Academic Libraries, with an emphasis on academic communities.  Key topics will include definitions, current and future trends, and the potential impact of MOOCs on the library’s role, financials, policies, and collections. Learn more about this growing phenomenon and how your library can be involved.  Ms. Schwartz will be joined by Lynn Sutton, PhD, Dean, Z Smith Reynolds Library Wake Forest University and Rick Anderson, Interim Dean, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, who will provide insights and comments on this topic from the front lines of their institutions. 

Join us for this exciting session on one of the hottest topics effecting education today.

VIDEO

We talk about collections all the time. How to build and share them. How to provide access. How to enlist the community in selecting.  How to prove the value of collections.  How to use collection statistics. We even talk about collections that are hidden and how to get rid of the ones we no longer need. What we infrequently discuss is how to get community members connected with the collections. A hot topic of conversation, particularly in the design of work environments, is how to create collisions that lead to good outcomes. In this plenary session Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian at Temple University, will share insights into why we need to start talking about designing our libraries, both physical and virtual, with collisions in mind. If the whole point of collections is to facilitate interactions with discovery, research and learning, then we have to come up with better ways to design it into the library experience.

Beth Paul's Slides
John Vaughn's Slides

VIDEO

Three senior leaders will reveal what Provosts worry about when they think about libraries. Charged to be frank and direct, they will talk about what they value in libraries, but also about what the challenges are that they face that affect how they think about libraries.  Budget, facilities, and their perception of what faculty and students want and need will all play into this.  This session is an opportunity for a frank exchange of views with real provosts -- without worrying about how they react!

VIDEO

Traditional roles of libraries, publishers, service providers, and even patrons are continually changing. Libraries increasingly take on functions previously managed by publishers—in some cases, by actually becoming traditional publishers, through the absorption of university press operations and the creation of IR-based journals, and in some cases by making direct investments in dissemination, by underwriting Open Access APCs. Librarians are expanding into learning, instructional design, software development and more, providing services around the world to a much wider range of patrons.  Meanwhile, patron driven initiatives are continue to alter the way libraries acquire content, giving rise to questions about how collections are built and how publisher business models are morphing. Content types are blurring. Textbooks, reference works, journals, books, audio, video, learning tools, lectures, primary sources and more are all fair game for course materials, often delivered via Learning Management Systems—bringing publishers and services into the space as well. Four industry veterans discuss this rapidly changing landscape, identifying key trends and key questions: What happens when libraries become publishers or service providers? How do we measure the success and value of patrons as selectors? What role does discovery play in the modern library? How can subscription content best be leveraged in the classroom? How can pricing be more visible to all? How can assessment help instructors and libraries make better-informed decisions? If these overlapping trends continue, they bring with them interesting possibilities for the shifting nature of the library and for a new understanding of what it means to "publish." Come prepared with your own examples of the changing nature of education. Will the library of the future be the disruptor or the disrupted?

Glenn Johnson-Grau (slides)

VIDEO

The role of the library keeps changing, particularly with the development of new education models and technologies.  User behaviors are changing too, and libraries need to adapt and use different approaches in providing library services and access to content.  Digital tools make online content search easy, but sometimes the value the library brings gets lost, even though it is the library that purchases, sets up and maintains that online access to content.  The most recent Ithaka US Faculty Survey highlights this misunderstanding - a large percentage of scientists feel that “because faculty have easy access to academic content online, the role librarians play at <their> institution is becoming much less important”.

What new value-added benefits and services can libraries consider to help teaching faculty and researchers, or increase the prestige of their school?  As higher education explores online and MOOC opportunities, how can libraries provide support?  

Rick Burke, Executive Director of SCELC, will share challenges he hears from libraries. As the e-resource marketplace has evolved, the need has grown for tools to help libraries promote and manage access to those resources, while providing a means to assert the library's role in making those resources available.  He will discuss SCELC's experiences in bringing these tools to the consortial marketplace.

Matt Goldner, Product and Technology Advocate of OCLC, will give insights on the changing relationship between library and school community, as well as OCLC's initiatives to help libraries adjust to the new landscapes.

Franny Lee, Co-Founder of SIPX, will discuss the research conducted by the Stanford Intellectual Property Exchange on measuring the content access benefits that the library relationship brings to higher education students, as well as SIPX's experiences translating requests and feedback from libraries into opportunities for copyright education and user interface design that makes the library's role visible.

Glenn Johnson-Grau, Head of Collection Development at Loyola Marymount University, will discuss the effect of diminishing visibility on academic libraries as users decreasingly associate the "library" with the physical collection and the new opportunities that open when we strengthen campus relationships and reassert our value in the academic mission of our organizations. 

Amy Friedlander (slides)

Howard Ratner (slides)

Judy Ruttenberg (slides)

John Wilbanks (slides)

VIDEO

In February, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a memo directing each US funding agency with over $100 million in annual research expenditure to develop a plan to support public access to the results of research funded by the federal government, including results published in scholarly journals.  How has the OSTP memo impacted scholarly publishing so far? What exactly has been achieved so far and what will it mean for the future of US published research?  This interactive session features a panel of speakers who will be discussing the recent developments and emerging issues from the librarian, funder, researcher, and publisher perspectives.  Among the questions to be addressed are:

• What is the US position on implementing open access?
• What steps have been taken to implement OSTP objectives?
• What role do institutional repositories play in open access?
• How will funder’s open access policies impact universities and researchers?
• What role are publishers playing in the implementation of open access?
• How will open access content be linked and measured? Will it affect usage? 

VIDEO

Since the inception of indexed-based ‘web-scale’ discovery services for libraries, JSTOR has been providing metadata to Primo (Ex Libris), EDS (EBSCO), Summon (Serials Solutions), and WorldCat Local (OCLC).  By participating in these services JSTOR’s aim was to help libraries leverage their significant investments in their discovery service of choice and to help students, faculty, and researchers find the content available on the JSTOR platform at their chosen starting point.

While there have been a number of studies on these discovery services, there is little written about the impact on content usage from the perspective of the content provider. JSTOR has undertaken a comprehensive analysis of the use of their content in the discovery services to better comprehend   “how” usage (as measured by COUNTER) is being impacted at institutions that have implemented these services, investigate “why” these usage changes might be occurring, and to gain an understanding of “what” content providers, libraries, and the discovery software providers can do to make this a more virtuous circle.

VIDEO

In the UK on June 2012 the Finch Group published its report: Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: how to expand access to research publications. The Finch group with representatives from scholarly publishing and UK academia agreed that the broad open access is the way of the future and that the preferred path is ‘gold’. On 16 July 2012, the Research Councils UK unveiled its new Open Access policy informed by the work of the Finch Group. The policy mandates that research outputs must be published in journals that are compliant with Research Council policy on Open Access, and must use of the Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ license (CC-BY), when an Article Processing Charge (APC) is levied. The Research Council also announced it would provide block grants to eligible UK Higher Education Institutions, support payment of the APCs associated with ‘pay-to-publish’.

This presentation will outline what this means for the UK library consortium in supporting it members in terms of containing on-going cost of gold open access while maintaining journal subscriptions and in the practical issues of implementing the Research Councils policy.

VIDEO

Picking up the thread from last year’s Charleston plenary on the past, present, and future of university presses, panelists will engage in a structured discussion designed to demystify the behind-the-scenes workings of presses and libraries and to chart the paths to successful service to the academic community.

Each panelist will open with a brief statement, “One Thing I Wish Everyone Knew About Publishers/Libraries.” Discussion of these key topics will follow:

• Change is the Only Constant: What is something that is changing/revolutionizing your work? How does that affect your scholarly counterparts?


• Open Access Material: What price access, and how does the question of tenure fit into this discussion? What works for your operation now? What are some possibilities for the future?


• Money: What is the true cost of making books, as well as the true cost of buying those books? What resources do our operations need for true service that is also sustainable?


• Two Sides of the Same Coin: Why do libraries and university presses still need each other? What is it that our counterparts do for us and for our operations?

This roundtable discussion will be followed by an open Q&A to engage with members of the audience.

VIDEO

Ann Okerson's Intro Slides
Madelyn Wessel's Slides
Georgia Harper's Slides

In this session, we will offer "something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue."  You decide which is which!  We will hear from legal experts about topics such as: the Supreme Court's decision at the end of March 2013 in the Kirtsaeng case; the various spillovers arising from the U.S. Department of Justice antitrust enforcement action against Apple and various e-book publishers for price fixing, including substantial settlement(s), subject to court approval; an intellectual property overview focused particularly on MOOCs; and a close look at some seemingly shifting (over time) court views about fair use, particularly transformative uses.  All of these have been much in the news and as usual, we will have some of the most informed and library-savvy presenters on these topics.

In favor, Jean-Claude Guedon (University of Montreal); opposed, Rick Anderson (University of Utah).

VIDEO

Opening Poll Results: 38 in favor, 12 opposed.

Opening Statement from Rick Anderson
Opening Statement from Jean-Claude Guedon

Rebuttal from Rick Anderson
Rebuttal from Jean-Claude Guedon

Closing Poll Results: 26 in favor, 14 opposed

The debate will be conducted in general accordance with Oxford Union rules. All in the audience will vote their opinion on the resolution before the debate begins, and the vote totals will be recorded. Each speaker will offer a formal opening statement, followed by a response to each other’s statements, and then we’ll open the floor to discussion. At the conclusion of the debate, another vote will be taken. The winner of the debate is the one who caused the most audience members to change their votes. Members of the audience have an opportunity to make comments and pose questions as well.

Join us for what is sure to be a lively discussion, and come ready to share your opinions! Refreshments will be provided.