The announced theme of this year’s Charleston Conference, an annual gathering of academic librarians, scholarly publishers, and vendors who sell products and services to libraries, was “Anything Goes!” The guiding question, though, was “Whom should we trust?” and the answer, more often than not, was “Trust the patron.”
The Charleston Conference has been going on now for 30 years. Meant to be informal, it’s not sponsored by a particular professional association. Participants talk technology, hear how colleagues tackle tasks such as culling print collections, and speculate about where the scholarly communication enterprise is headed. One state-university librarian told a reporter he finds the conference useful because librarians and vendors talk frankly about money here—about how much problems and possible solutions really cost. Included on panels, vendors have a chance to make the case for their products in the context of broader discussions about “issues in book and serial acquisition,” as the conference’s subtitle puts it.
Despite a general acknowledgment that budgets have shrunk and aren’t like to plump up again soon, attendees had other, less-tangible issues on their minds. Librarians and publishers found common ground in their concerns about the value of scholarly brands and institutions.
At one plenary session, “Who Do We Trust? The Meaning of Brand in Scholarly and Academic Librarianship,” Kent Anderson, the chief executive and publisher of the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, suggested that publishers and librarians focus too much on brand—the reputation of a big-name scholarly publisher, for instance—when they ought to be more concerned with the quality of what’s presented under that name. The public will lose trust in a brand, he said, if it shows up on too large or uneven a range of products or services.
Hazel Woodward, university librarian at Cranfield University in England, observed that librarians are stuck in the middle between the creators and consumers of scholarly content. That means they have to trust both publishers and scholars to provide and use the content libraries buy or make accessible.
The concept of trust turned up again and again. At a session on “Deselecting the Monographs Collection: One Library’s Adventure in Weeding,” two librarians from Eastern Kentucky University talked about how essential it is, when pulling items from a collection, that faculty members and other librarians trust the library staff members charged with culling each subject area.
According to Margaret Foote, the library’s coordinator of collection services, trusting the librarians to maintain the right kind of collection has a practical consequence, too: The university’s accreditation depends in part on its having up-to-date teaching materials for its medicine, nursing, and education students. “We began to be much more thoughtful about our collection because of accreditation,” she said. “It’s important that we keep that collection constantly current.”
A User-Driven Future
One of the biggest themes of the gathering was patron-driven acquisition—the notion that users ought to have a say in what a library acquires because they know best what materials they need and want. Rick Anderson, associate director for scholarly resources and collections at the University of Utah libraries, gave a talk at the opening plenary called “Let Them Eat ... Everything: Embracing a Patron-Driven Future.” For a lot of libraries, that future is already here. At least eight other conference sessions focused on different models and specific institutions’ experiences with letting patrons rather than librarians drive at least some acquisitions decisions.
Sometimes, however, what the user wants puts a library in a difficult spot. Sue Woodson, the associate director of digital collection services at Welch Medical Library at the Johns Hopkins University, gave a poignant talk about how she’d been charged with getting rid of 80 percent of that library’s print holdings by 2012. The library’s goals include having all of its collections online, embedding librarians in the medical school’s various departments, and having excellent discovery tools in place. They have to take the library to the patron now, Ms. Woodson said, because the patron no longer comes to them. That means the library building itself is going to be repurposed. “We’re a service,” she said of the library’s current identity. “We’re no longer an institution of cultural memory.”
The conference made it clear that librarians and publishers and the vendors who work with them are eager, even anxious, to figure out what their customers, whoever they are, really want. John Sack, associate publisher and director of HighWire Press, based at the Stanford University libraries, presented findings from a small survey of Stanford researchers the press conducted to find out how they were using journal content. He said scholarly publishers focus too much on the box in which they provide that content—the classic journal article, for instance—when readers care far more about what’s in the box. How does a publisher, or a librarian, really reach readers when Amazon.com is researchers’ default book catalog and everybody totes the information they need around with them on their laptops?
One striking finding involved journals’ RSS feeds, which many publishers use to push out news about their latest offerings. Many of the survey’s respondents subscribe to RSS feeds, but few read them. “RSS is where journals go to die,” Mr. Sack said.
