And They Were There: Reports of Meetings -- ASA Annual 2012 Conference and the 31st Annual Charleston Conference
THURS., NOV.
Charleston Conference
Sever Bordeianu 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
0 University of New Mexico , USA
1 WhatToDo AboutData - Presented by Anthony Watkinson (University College London); Linda Beebe (American Psychological Association); Fiona Murphy , Wiley-Blackwell
2 Reported by: Margaret M. Kain, University of Alabama at Birmingham , Mervyn H. Sterne Library , USA
3 Reported by: Angharad Roberts, University of Sheffield , Information School
4 Free Is the Best Price: Building Your Collection of Primary Sources with Free, Online, Digital Collections - Presented by Joan Petit, Portland State University
5 Reported by: Jill Crawly- Low, University Library, University of Saskatchewan
6 Reported by: Robert Weaver, Liberty University
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And They Were There
Reports of Meetings — ASA Annual 2012 Conference and the 31st Annual Charleston Conference
Column Editor: Sever Bordeianu (Head, Print Resources Section, University Libraries, MSC05 3020, 1 University of New
Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001; Phone: 505-277-2645; Fax: 505-277-9813) <>
AssociationofSubscription Agents AnnualConference2012
— “Best Way To Predict The Future Is To Invent It” —
Cavendish Conference Centre, London, February 27-28, 2012
Reported by: Anthony Watkinson (University College,
London) <>
Not all readers will know about the organisation and even fewer about
its annual conference, so some words about both first. ASA was founded
in the UK back in 1934 but has continued to represent subscription agents
and other information intermediaries as the fortunes of such entities might
be said to have waxed and waned. It is international. It provides quality
assurance to customers and is in “continuous consultation” with them in
order to supply their “evolving needs”.
The conference was initiated fairly recently and now happens in late
winter in London, providing a forum with a special twist for publishers,
librarians and other vendors, as well as the vendors themselves. This
year the conference happened 27-28 February and the programme was
mainly devised by Nawin Gupta — the current secretary general — and
his predecessor Sarah Durrant. Nawin is based in Chicago and has
had a distinguished career in Reed Elsevier, the American Medical
Association, and The University of Chicago Press.
There were six sessions (for the details and most of the presentations
at
http://www.subscription-agents.org/conferences/asa-annual-conference-2012) on the whole of high quality but, as one would expect, not
always of central interest to librarians. The session titles were Context
not Containers, The Semantic Webb. Libraries — What Next, eBooks
AgainsttheGrain/ April2012
– Onwards and Upwards finishing with two sessions on New Roles for
the Modern Intermediary.
The first talk of the first session was something of a keynote. The thesis
of Brian O’Leary is indicated by his title Context First – a unified field
theory of publishing. Expanded it was about the damage done by the
container model of publishing which derives from the physical environment.
Containers appear not to be quite the same as silos but equally unhelpful
for the end users. Containers cut out context including metadata and
links, which is crucial in the digital environment. To compete digitally as
a publisher you have to start with the context, and this is much easier for
those without the print legacy. Agile workflows should not be used as a
means of improving the containers but rather as making the content more
useful and usable. Alas this densely-argued presentation is one of the few
not (yet?) up on the site. The second presentation came from ProQuest:
it and the third presentation are available. Tim Babbitt, a senior
vicepresident from ProQuest Platforms addressed librarians directly. He was
concerned with the “current asymmetry of customer and user” and how
librarians find out what their patrons want, whether they are accessing
information directly or using machines. Finally Timo Hannay spoke
about the new initiative from the publisher Macmillan, Digital Science,
which brings together some of the social media projects of the Nature
Publishing Group into solutions for the (...truncated)