From May 27th through May 30th, I attended the NASIG Annual Conference in Washington, DC. My conference experience began with a daylong symposium that was co-sponsored by NASIG and the Society for Scholarly Publishing. This meeting which, I helped to organize through my participation on the planning committee for the event, was titled “Evolving Information Policies and Their Implications: A Conversation for Librarians and Publishers” and featured three keynote presentations (designed to represent the perspectives of the publisher, librarian, and vendor communities) along with two panels.

The first keynote presentation was given by Jayne Marks (Vice President of Global Publishing, LWW Journals, Wolters Kluwer) and was intended to reflect a publisher perspective on information policy. Marks’ presentation emphasized how changes in public policies are driving many forms of experimentation and innovation among publishers to identify sustainable new publishing models.

Next, T. Scott Plutchak (Director of Digital Data Curation Strategies, University of Alabama at Birmingham) addressed information policy from a librarian perspective. Plutchak emphasized the tremendous challenges of data management (as opposed to the somewhat less daunting work of managing the published outputs of research). He characterized data management as a ‘wicked problem’ which has boundaries that are difficult to define and which requires a multidisciplinary approach to effectively address. Plutchak argued that libraries can play a lead role in addressing these challenges through the development of data management plans, establishment of best practices, management of institutional repositories, and support of the digital humanities. In saying this however, he emphasized that library personnel need to look at the work of data management not as library problem but as an institution-level problem that libraries can play an important role in solving.

The last keynote presentation was from a member of the vendor community, Caitlin Trasande (Senior Strategy Editor, Nature Publishing Group). Echoing some of the points made by Marks, Trasande emphasized that changes in information policy are driving innovations. She placed particular emphasis on innovations involving the assessment of social impact and sharing of research processes and outputs, and, in this context, she described some of the products and services of Digital Science.

The NASIG-SSP event concluded with two panel sessions. The first panel session was moderated by October Ivins (Ivins eContent Solutions) and featured two lawyers (Peter Jaszi and Michael Remington) specializing in intellectual property and copyright. The second panel was moderated by Robert Boissy (Springer) and featured all of the speakers and panelists from the event’s earlier sessions.

The second day of the conference (May 28) began with a Speakers Breakfast in which I met most of the presenters in the six concurrent sessions that I introduced (I was assigned with this role because of my membership on NASIG’s Program Planning Committee). The first presentation of the day was a keynote presentation given by Dorothea Salo (Faculty Associate, University of Wisconsin – Madison) entitled “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do (Read Serials).” Salo advocated that libraries should be stronger guardians of patron privacy and that libraries should work to give users of library e-resources the same privacy protections afforded to users of physical libraries.

Next, I attended the concurrent session “Developing Standards for Emerging Forms of Assessment: The NISO Altmetrics Initiative” by Todd Carpenter and Nettie Lagace. The NISO Altmetrics Initiative has been in process since 2013 and aims to analyze the environment of altmetrics and create standards and recommended practices in support of the future development of altmetrics. Carpenter and Lagace reported that, since April, five NISO working groups have been formed to define key terms, calculate methodologies for specific output types, improve the quality of data, promote the use of identifiers, and describe the value of altmetrics. NISO’s goal is to have a draft recommended practice related to altmetrics published by the fall of 2015.

I then attended the concurrent session “Beyond Journal Impact and Usage Statistics: Using Citation Analysis for Collection Development” by Wenli Gao (University of Houston), which discussed a project that used Scopus to analyze the citations in University of Houston communications faculty publications between 2006 and 2014. The project attempted to find correlations between faculty citations, journal impact factor, and usage. Gao reported that the project found that there was a correlation between usage and impact but not correlations between faculty citations and either usage or impact.

The third concurrent session that I attended on May 28th was “Comparing Digital Apples and Oranges: A Comparative Analysis of Ebooks across Multiple Platforms” by Esta Tovstiadi and Gabrielle Weirsma (both from the University of Colorado – Boulder). The focus here was on a comparative analysis of how e-books can be accessed across multiple platforms. Using a sample of about a hundred e-books (all published by academic presses in 2014) that are accessible on at least three platforms, Tovstiadi and Weirsma examined 34 elements relevant to usability of the sample e-books. This analysis uncovered a wide variety of problems and inconsistencies ranging from bibliographic data to pagination, linking, and searching capabilities.

The third day (May 29) of the conference began with a meeting of the Nominations & Electronic Committee, a committee on which I am serving as Chair-Elect. Next, I attended the keynote presentation “Somewhere to Run to, Nowhere to Hide” by Stephen Rhind-Tutt (Alexander Street Press). Rhind-Tutt discussed the trends (including streaming media, open linked data, data sets, and text mining) that are driving change in the information landscape and examined the extent to which we can forecast the future development of those trends. He emphasized repeatedly that we are in an information landscape characterized by evolution (continual transformation) rather than revolution (one transformation followed by stability).

The concurrent session “Introduction to Usus, a Community Website on Library Usage, and a Discussion about COUNTER 4” was presented by Ann Osterman (Virtual Library of Virginia), Oliver Pesch (EBSCO), and Kari Schmidt (Montgomery College). Their presentation concerned Usus, a web resource supported by COUNTER as a community-based website to enable librarians, publishers and other stakeholders to share information and questions concerning library e-resource usage issues. The presenters discussed examples of how Usus has provided constructive solutions to complex e-resource usage issues and also discussed the recently released COUNTER 4 Code of Practice.

Next, I attended “Troubleshooting E-Resources with ILL,” which was presented by Beth Ashmore (Samford University). Ashmore discussed how Samford University used ILL request data for materials accessible online through the library to identify problems with the implementation of the library’s new link resolver as well as systematic problems related to the metadata of certain sources and the library’s knowledgebase. Ashmore described how the library’s analysis didn’t just solve linking problems but also led to improved communications between e-resource management library personnel and the library’s ILL department.

On the last day of the conference, May 30th, I attended the concurrent session “Beyond the Research Paper: Extending the Use of Collections” by Kristen Garlock (JSTOR) and Eric Johnson (Folger Shakespeare Library). Garlock’s portion of the presentation discussed a project at JSTOR to analyze usage patterns of JSTOR articles to identify and promote access to those articles that are being incorporated into course curriculum. Next, Johnson discussed a recent partnership between JSTOR and the Folger Shakespeare Library that resulted in the development of Understanding Shakespeare, an initiative to integrate links to JSTOR articles into the digital editions of Shakespeare plays. The integration functions such that users can click on any line in a play and be provided with a list of articles that cite that line of text.