Report from the NFAIS (National Federation of Advanced Information Services) 57th Annual Meeting, February 2015
Serials & E-Resources News
0 Report from the NFAIS (National Federation of Advanced Information Services) 57
1 Reported by Elizabeth Ten Have
ing & Indexing Services (NFAIS) was founded in 1958, many librarians many not be acquainted with this organization. The NFAIS annual meeting is more intimate than the Charleston Conference, but not entirely dissimilar in tone and goal, as it serves as the place where primary and secondary publishers come together for candid conversations about content, technology, usability, business models, and strategies for staying relevant in the noisy world of scholarly information. When one considers that the largest secondary publishers are also some of the biggest platform providers - Ebsco, ProQuest, Thomson Reuters, etc. - the attendee list at NFAIS is familiar to the NASIG community.
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The theme of this year’s gathering, Anticipating
Demand: The User Experience as Driver, served as an
umbrella for a diverse group of speakers, including
established publishers, start-ups, academia, technology
companies, consultancies and libraries. Some talks
showcased impressive new tools for promoting,
discovering and managing information, while others
explored the economic and technological challenges of
producing and delivering information in electronic form.
There were a couple of common themes across the
range of speakers—the most prevalent was metadata.
In fact, nearly every speaker mentioned the importance
of good, contextual metadata, describing metadata for
search engines, metadata for secondary publishers, and
metadata for end-users. Search engines need good
metadata for appropriate relevancy ranking. Secondary
publishers need good metadata for presenting and
connecting like content. End-users need visible
metadata in order to quickly connect to the information
they seek, and then to help manage information while
synthesizing it with their own work. Speakers from
knowledge discovery tool developers, Sparrho,
Sciencescape, and ZappyLab, all stated metadata is a
critical ingredient for their products. Kate Lawrence of
EBSCO described the company’s research regarding
undergraduate research habits, and the results revealed
how metadata provided important context and
meaning in a long list of search results for study
participants.
Another theme that emerged was the pace and method
of technology development. The long-term
development processes that lead to launching
enhancements to users every couple of years seem to
be fading. Alex Humphreys of JSTOR noted that in
JSTOR’s current infrastructure, migration-project new
code is released dozens of times a week. In his talk,
Humphreys’ detailed the week long development of
JSTOR’s Snap application for mobile devices
(http://labs.jstor.org/blog/), which allows an end-user
to take a picture of some text, then the application
OCRs that text, resulting in keywords for the end-user
to employ while searching JSTOR. The challenges of
adopting of new methods which speed up product
development and deployment were mentioned by both
presenters and attendees.
A third theme, which could be broadly referred to as
the economics of information, is not new. Micah
Altman, of MIT Libraries and the Brookings Institution,
titled his plenary talk Information wants someone else
to pay for it: as science and scholarship evolve who
consumes and who pays? Altman reviewed the trend of
rapid change in scholarly communication, as well as the
players and drivers. Using economic theory, he noted
that in this particular market, the market itself will not
be able to sort it out. The longstanding issue in scholarly
communication of the payer and the end-user not
necessarily being the same, and the issue of having
differing goals and outcome measures, is now further
complicated by technological change and change in
what scholarship is: it is no longer defined by
publications.
A highpoint to each NFAIS Annual Meeting is the Miles
Conrad Memorial Lecture. Named in honor of one of
NFAIS’ founders, the lecture each year features an
industry leader. In the recent past Lorcan Dempsey
(OCLC), Dame Lynne Brindley (British Library), and Ben
Shneiderman (University of Maryland) have been Miles
Conrad lecturers. This year’s lecture was delivered by
Tim Collins, president & CEO of EBSCO Industries.
Collins’ lecture encompassed the history of the EBSCO
business and its current focus of fitting into the library
workflow chain (EBSCO’s acquisition of YBP from Baker
& Taylor was announced just prior to the start of the
NFAIS meeting). Another focus described by Collins
revolved around EBSCO’s work and investments to
improving the user experience, based on extensive
research with end-users. Again, metadata was
prominently mentioned as a tool for providing
improved relevancy results, browsing capabilities, and
content for services and tools.
The meeting schedule also includes social space for
informal conversation over coffee and meal breaks. The
opportunity to speak informally and in- (...truncated)