And They Were There: Reports of Meetings -- ASA Annual 2012 Conference and the 31st Annual Charleston Conference

Against the Grain, Jul 2016

By Sever Bordeianu, Published on 07/14/16

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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 - subscription plans for libraries SERVICE SCIENCE NEW INFORMS Journal Driven by today’s new business environment research in the service sector is creating new sources of innovation, collaboration, and value co-creation for people's satisfaction and success. Service Science, a fully refereed online-only journal, publishes state-of-the-art research, education, practice, and breakthroughs in the service science. http://servsci.pubs.informs.org Subscribe Today! Phone: +1.800.4.INFORMs www.informs.org/subscribe Pubs Suite Subscribe to the entire 13-journal package of INFORMS full-range of business and engineering journals covering operations research, management science, and analytics studies. You get print+online or online-only access to all 2012 content plus all online issues back through 1998. www.informs.org/inst-pubssuite 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)


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Sever Bordeianu. And They Were There: Reports of Meetings -- ASA Annual 2012 Conference and the 31st Annual Charleston Conference, Against the Grain, 2016, Volume 24, Issue 2,