From November 5th through the 7th I attended the Charleston Conference in Charleston, South Carolina. This conference focuses on issues of collection management in libraries. Below I describe some of the sessions that I found to be most valuable. Please don’t hesitate to let me know if you’d like for me to share any additional information about the sessions that I attended.

In the plenary session “Star Wars in the Library,” Jim O’Donnell (director of libraries at Arizona State University) discussed three basic principles that should guide libraries in the future. The first of these principles is that “all students are online students.” Here he suggested that all library users engage with the library’s resources and services through online interfaces. The second principle is that “knowledge is a verbal noun.” In discussing this principle, O’Donnell argued that libraries should flip their view of knowledge. Rather than viewing knowledge as stable collections, libraries should embrace models in which they become places where knowledge is being collaboratively created on an ongoing basis. The third principle that O’Donnell articulated was that “print books have a long and glorious future.” He argued that libraries need to think very intentionally and deliberately about their print collections, giving focus to the value that they want these collections to serve for their users. He emphasized the importance of special collections, noting that it is the unique special collections holdings that—to a significant extent—will differentiate libraries.

“The Secret Life of Articles: From Download Metrics to Downstream Impact” was a session that I attended in which the presenters (Lorraine Estelle – COUNTER, Wouter Haak – Elsevier, and Carol Tenopir – University of Tennessee Knoxville) discussed the results of the Beyond Downloads Project in which one thousand scholars from around the world were interviewed and surveyed regarding how they access, store, share, and use the scholarly articles that they download. Five primary takeaways from the study were highlighted: First, sharing of information is an inherent part of the research process. A researcher’s initial action of accessing an article is just a means to the end of sharing that information. Second, sharing of articles takes many different forms. While sharing of full-text in PDF form is most common, researchers also frequently just share citation information. Remarkably, the study showed that, on average, a researcher will share an article almost a dozen times. Not surprisingly, the study found as its third takeaway that the primary means of sharing articles was through email messages, followed by cloud services (e.g., DropBox). The fourth takeaway was that, for scholars, the version of the article matters a great deal – they strongly prefer sharing the final copy of the article over an e/pre-print version. The final takeaway was that the library is a key tool in supporting the sharing of articles. The presentation also highlighted the fact that COUNTER data does not reflect the full extent of usage of an article. Beyond usage captured by COUNTER, there is a rich ecosystem of scholarly sharing.

Michael Levine-Clark’s (University of Denver) presentation “What Do Our Users Think About eBooks? 10 Years of Survey Data at the University of Denver” described the results of three user surveys (one in 2005, one in 2010, and one in 2015) concerning e-book usage and attitudes at the University of Denver. Not surprisingly, the survey results together demonstrate a steady increase in the frequency of use of e-books since 2005. Additionally, the results showed that, over time, an increasing number of users are reading entire books in electronic form. When asked if they prefer reading books in print or electronic form, the significant majority continue to prefer the print format. However, the date also shows that, when the reading experience is scoped to just a chapter, about half of users prefer the electronic format over print. Also, users showed a preference for the electronic format in instances in which they were using the book to search for just one specific piece of information.

“Life Post-ILS Migration: How Far Have We Come Since Our Go-Live Dates and Where Do We Go from Here?” was a particularly timely for me given that it’s three presenters (Susan Flanagan – Getty Research Institute, Moon Kim – California State University (CSU) – Fullerton, and Ann Kutulas – Tarrant County College) discussed their experiences with implementation of Alma/Primo. These experiences were quite different. The Getty Research Institute, for example, was an early adopter of Alma/Primo (they went live in late summer of 2012) and had the luxury of a significant amount of time to do pre-implementation planning. Tarrant County College, in contrast, had just four months to plan for a migration in the summer of 2015. And, CSU Fullerton is currently in the process of working with the 22 other California State university libraries to plan a transition to Alma/Primo in the summer of 2017. Some of the points that the presenters raised were:

• When migrating data, be sure to focus primarily on the functional fields in Alma.
• Do not always expect that existing workflows can be retained in Alma; rather Alma should lead you to rethink workflows.
• One attendee who also recently implemented Alma/Primo commented that she found it useful to think of Alma not so much as a system but has a member of the library’s team and as another voice at the table.
• Life post-migration gets better over time. Problem lists decrease in length. Weekly troubleshooting meetings eventually decrease in frequency to semi-monthly meetings.
• Make use of resources such as the Alma/Primo helpdesk and the listserv.
• Alma is changing each month. It is very important to play close attention to updates to the system and think about how the updates should impact workflows and processes.

In the session “The Unknown Path—Evaluating Electronic Resources for Accessed-Based Collection Development,” two librarians from the University of North Texas (Erin Miller and Laurel Sammonds Crawford) described a significant shift in the processes and criteria that their library uses in the selection of e-resources. Formerly, selection of e-resources was carried out by public services librarians. In response to significant budget cuts, the library has shifted to an access-based philosophy of collection management in which selection decisions are made by behind-the-scenes collection managers. The library’s new model is rooted in the following principles for decision-making: evaluation, negotiation, transparency, and documentation. The presenters noted that one of the things that they have decided not to consider when assessing resources is long-term ownership. The library developed a new rubric that it uses to apply these principles when assessing requests for new e-resources. The rubric helps the library to consistently assess the content and usability of e-resources. The library had developed a separate checklist that they apply when reviewing e-resource licenses. They begin the license review and negotiation process prior to when an acquisition decision is made so that (a) the acquisition can be carried out more quickly once the decision to purchase is made and (b) they can use license terms as a factor when deciding whether to acquire.

Katherine Skinner’s (Educopia Institute) plenary session “From Act to Impact” was all about transformation. Drawing on the fields of sociology and economics, she commented that, in general, innovation tends to occur in small pockets and those small pockets of innovation do not always scale-out to broader transformations. Skinner argued that all stakeholders in the ecosystem of scholarly publishing have important roles to play in effecting broad change during what she characterized as a critical moment and opportunity. The conditions that have aligned to create this opportune moment include:

• Technological innovations
• New competitors in the information ecosystem
• Political shifts from a focus on public goods to privatized interests
• An information deluge

Skinner said that, oftentimes, change occurs on the fringe of fields. Field-wide change depends on the development of networks of stakeholders, all open to and focused on achieving innovation over stasis. Skinner then shifted focus to trace the origins of the current scholarly communications crisis. She argued that the popularly attributed drivers of this crisis are too simple and that, fundamentally, this crisis was brought about by technological innovations (e.g., photocopiers) that made it much easier to copy/reproduce scholarly literature, the increasing specialization and diversification of fields of research, and a growing preoccupation with rankings in higher education (e.g., the rankings published by US News & World Report). These factors ultimately led to increases in the number of journals, the consolidation of publishers of these journals, and an inadequacy in library budgets to acquire access to the scholarly record. “Big deal” publisher journal packages seemingly provided relief from these pressures but such a model has also proven untenable, and today we have a deeply weakened system of scholarly communications. In trying to fix this system, we have a tendency to think locally (i.e., meeting the immediate needs of users) when we should be thinking globally. In addition to this challenge, we face obstacles related to the collection and analysis of data regarding the usage of information resources and services. The more data that we have, the greater is our ability for predictive analysis. Those stakeholders that have the most data and that have the funding and capacity for an in-depth predictive analysis have a greater ability to strategically plan for the future. This is a challenge for libraries since an individual library only sees a small slice of data and also upholds commitments to using this data in a way that is ethical and respects user privacy – boundaries that commercial enterprises may not heed. To try to address this challenge, Skinner advocated that libraries need to work as a community, sharing measurements, developing common agendas, and engaging in open and extended dialogue. She cited a new initiative, Project Meerkat (which is looking at usage data concerning monographs – including the ethics of data collection and sharing and cooperative infrastructure for usage data modeling) as one example of how libraries can build a communication network that supports transformation.