I'm in my second full day at the Charleston Conference and am floored by the intensity and overwhelming amount of information and presentation. So many good presentations to choose from, so little time! I only wish there was more time to see more sessions. Within each concurrent session time slot, there are at least 4 or 5 sessions I'm interested in attending. Its proving to be a tough choice.
Today, Tim Spalding from LibraryThing was supposed to give a talk on social cataloging; however, Tim's flight was delayed and he was stuck in Cleveland (poor guy!). Another talk was given by Andrew Pace on "webscale workflow", emphasizing the need for discontinuation of our independent silos and a more cost-effective and efficient streamlined networked library management systems he calls the webscale workflow. Here is just a sampling of some the trends & themes I'm encountering here at Charleston:
- Creation of a peer review watermark and/or symbol to indicate trustworthiness of documents and webpages on the web (a la Creative Commons symbol for copyright)
- RDA (Resource Description & Access) -- what is it, will it succeed, will it die? This is a new one to me, not being familiar with the ins and outs of cataloging, but this will have implications for us with regards to metadata and cataloging our digital content
- OCLC's WorldCat Selection to streamline ordering and acquisitions of materials via one system without having to go to multiple vendors and/or publishers and/or jobbers
- Change in Technical Services operations; reorganizing and changing workflows of Technical Services operations as our organizations change in response to new and different services and priorities
- Scholarly communication -- what does it mean for libraries, how does it impact libraries and our workflows, what do we do with Institutional repositories, scholarly content created on our campuses and digitization of this material?
- Google and the settlement with the publishers/authors -- sounds like a really complicated settlement, but it might mean the way to increased access to material all over the U.S.
- EBooks, eBooks, EBOOKs!
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