Libraries represented at 24th Annual NASIG meeting

Recently, the Libraries sent Polly Khater, the serials cataloging coordinator, to the 24^th Annual Conference of the North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG), which was held June 4-7, 2009, in Asheville, North Carolina. The theme for this year’s meeting was “Riding the Rapids through a Mountain of Change.”  The kickoff vision speaker was Peter Morville of Semantic Studios. His talk, Ambient Findability: Libraries, Serials, and the Internet of Things, centered on web design, findability, and searching. Mr. Morville began the session with the statement “Information that’s hard to find will remain information that’s hardly found.” He created the information honeycomb, pictured below, which shows how aspects of information fit together. One statement that generated audience discussion was that people aren’t really motivated to tag resources for others. When people tag images on Flickr or books in LibraryThing, for example, the tags are for their own purposes of organization and findability, not for others who might use or look at the same materials.

Throughout the three days, many discussions and sessions were held on staffing, budget issues, return on investment studies, open access journals, preservation and ownership of electronic journals, and software tools used to manage serials. An overwhelming topic for participants was the economy and the resulting budget implications; practically all libraries in attendance are dealing with fewer funds for print and electronic journals, combined with fewer staff throughout  the library. Polly delivered a talk on the last day of the conference on the tool the Libraries uses to manage electronic journals, titled Using a Local ERMS to Manage E-Journals: Can It Get Any Better Than This?  It was well attended for an early morning session, and good discussion was had on the practices and procedures for managing electronic journals.

The conference closed with a talk from Geoffrey Bilder, of CrossRef. His talk, What Color is Your Paratext?, focused on the issue of information credibility. As the scholarly society transitions further onto the online environment, the heuristics we’ve used to designate scholarly resources and peer reviewed materials have changed, without much discussion or awareness. Mr. Bilder cited the book written by Anthony Grafton, The Footnote (which is held in the Special Collections Dibner Reference Collection), as an interesting text on the evolution of scholarly research.

NASIG, established in 1985, promotes communication, information, and continuing education about serials and the broader issues of scholarly communication. The annual conference provides a casual venue for preconferences, formal sessions, practical workshops, special events, and networking. An emphasis on thoughtful discourse and informality promotes an intensity of purpose not always possible at other conferences.—Polly Khater