Archive for the ‘Charleston Conference 2010’ Category

I just received this e-mail with some final details about the Charleston Conference:

And so another Charleston Conference came to a close.  Attendance surpassed all previous records–about 1,350.  You can view a timeline with all the photos shown at the opening session and high quality photos of the posters commemorating past conferences here.

Many of the speakers’ presentations will be available on Slideshare, and summaries will be published in Against the Grain in its next few issues.

The 31st Charleston Conference will be on November 3-5, 2011, preceded by the Vendor Showcase on November 2.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and Conference Circuit Blog Editor

One of the notable features of the Charleston Conference are the extremely entertaining skits presented by some of the attendees.  This year, the skit showed a look at conference planning over 30 years and featured a young Katina Strauch in some of her organizational tasks.  Here are some of the photos that we saw during this event.  Enjoy!

Jon Orwant

Those who stayed for the last plenary presentation on Friday enjoyed a treat.  One of the most interesting and fascinating presentations of the conference was by Jon Orwant, Engineering Manager on the Google Books project.  The Google Books is in accord with Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.  So far, Google has scanned about 15 million books, about 10% of those available.  This amounts to about 4 billion pages and 2 trillion words.  Google collects metadata from over 100 sources, parses the records, creates a “best” record for each data cluster, and displays appropriate parts of it on the site.  Problems are encountered with inconsistencies, particularly with multi-volume works and languages using non-Roman character sets.  One might think that ISBNs would help, but they are far from unique; in fact, ISBN 753305353 is shared by 1,413 books, and 6,000 ISBNs are associated with more than 20 titles each!  Google has scanned books in 463 languages, some of them used in only a small area and some which are no longer used.  There are even 3 books in the database in Klingon!  (Don’t try to search for them–many of the languages do not appear in the dropdown box on the Advanced Search page.) Books in many of the unusual languages have come from Christian missionaries as a result of their evangelical work.

Google has developed special handling methods to scan books from libraries without damaging them and also uses sophisticated algorithms to identify textual areas, images, tables, etc.  They try to understand the various parts of a book so that all the pages can be tagged.  Once the books have been digitized and run through optical character recognition, a large corpus of data is available for searching, but also other interesting purposes.  Using their well known 20% “free” time, several Google engineers have developed fascinating applications, such as a mashup with Google Maps showing all place names mentioned in a book, insights into human knowledge such as language changes over time, and publication rates of book subjects as a function of publication date.  Google even makes grants available to scientists and linguistic analysts to do research projects because they consider books as a corpus of human knowledge and a reflection of cultural and societal trends over time.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and Conference Circuit Blog Editor

The future of libraries is a burning question, and sessions on it occur at conferences with great regularity.  The E-Brarian Revolution panel looked at the following questions, and offered some fascinating observations:

• How will technology affect the future of librarians, publishers, and their offerings?
• Will print collections be completely replaced by electronic ones in the next 20 years?
• Will librarians as we know them no longer exist?
• How will patrons and students use libraries dependent entirely on electronic resources?
• What does the road to entirely digital look like, and what are publishers doing to set the pace?

Mehdi Khosrow-Pour, CEO of IGI-Global, moderated the panel and thinks that printed books will always be available because smaller libraries still cannot afford databases, people like the library experience, and it is impossible to replace serendipity possible with physical browsing.  He presented the results of a survey of 627 students on US campuses, in which 76% of them said they would pick up a printed book if it were available to them.  Mirela Roncevic, Editor of Advances in Library and Information Science, offered more data to support this, noting that we continue to talk about standardizing content formats, content may be born digital but not globally available, and there are still many old business models reinforcing inefficient practices.

Lynn Connaway, Research Scientist at OCLC, reported on one of her fascinating studies and said that libraries must build services around user workflows and provide seamless access to both printed and digital materials.  She thinks that librarians will become responsible for digitization, preservation and archiving of resources as well as educating users on their information needs.  At present, users spend little time using content and tend to download much of it for printing and reading later.   If we focus on the user, many of our problems will be solved.

Rick Anderson is haunted by the iPod.  It destroyed the music industry and is revolutionizing the communication industry because it became the iPhone.    In the 1990s, the information industry similarly did not anticipate what the web would do to scholarship.  We need to ask ourselves what is happening now that will radically redirect our industry.  What will we mean when we say “library”?  It won’t be a building full of books, but could become a collaborative research space or a central repository of scholarship and local collections.  Large databases of information are becoming available, and we risk being taken by surprise if we don’t pay attention to Google Books and Hathi Trust.

The library building will still be very important in the future.  Gate counts continue to rise because people love the library space.  They love to be able to work in groups.  For example, Anderson has observed at his University of Utah library that students like to study in groups and will often rearrange the furniture to accommodate their habits.  He said that no librarian should ever say “Shhh” to students; demand for space for collaboration has far surpassed that for quiet study.  (If they need a quiet space, it can be provided.)  He also said that the biggest competition is the student union.

One of the fastest growing sectors in the information marketplace is e-books and digital content, according to Kevin Sayer, president of ebrary. We are competing for students’ attention with the resources available on the web, primarily Google.  They are spending more and more of their time online.  They know that they have digital resources available to them, even if they don’t use them.   Librarians therefore need to cost-effectively and efficiently acquire the information students need, improve discoverability to help them find it, and manage large amounts of data from multiple platforms and vendors.  Publishers can help by offering electronic access simultaneously with the print (some already do this and even make the electronic version accessible ahead of the print), provide flexible pricing models to meet library budgets, and leverage new technologies for information distribution and delivery.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and Conference Circuit Blog Editor