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College and Research Libraries
January 2004, Vol. 65, No. 1

Book Review

Charleston Conference Proceedings 2001. Ed. Katina Strauch. Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited, 2003. 222p. $45 (ISBN 1591580730). LC 2003-535343.

The Charleston Conference has once again produced a volume of stimulating discussions on issues challenging today’s libraries and librarians. These papers (28 in all) were given at the 2001 conference, the twenty-first annual meeting that traditionally brings librarians, publishers, and vendors together to cover an array of topics of interest to all librarians, but especially to those working in acquisitions and collection management. Dominating the discussions (or at least present as a pervasive subtext in most of the papers) is recognition of the increasingly uneasy relationship between librarians and publishers/online vendors over the issues of access and price schedules. This conflict is most apparent in the negotiations between librarians and online serials vendors, and a number of the conference papers either outline the problems or try to explain some of the factors that have brought us to this state of affairs.

Indeed, Tom Sanville (OhioLINK) takes on the librarian–vendor issue directly in his thought-provoking keynote address entitled "The Trends They Are A’Changing." He explains one of the major reasons for the current chaos: We are all, he says, directly and daily faced with constant change in so many variables (technology, publishing practices, pricing, user needs) that "it’s impossible for us to really know what we’re doing." To make matters worse, few, if any, of these variables are under our control. The goal of OhioLINK (and any library) is to provide "economically sustainable increased information access," but libraries are losing ground each year trying to meet this ideal. In the short term, we must become better, more discerning buyers of databases and database packages. Perhaps we must even say no to subscriptions to enormously expensive online "package deals" and turn our attention to what is actually needed and used by our clientele. We no longer can offer our patrons the entire universe of knowledge from which to make their selections; it is need and usage that should be the deciding factors in our purchases.

A counterview is presented by David Goodman (Princeton) and Chuck Hamaker (UNC, Charlotte) in their paper, "Debate: Resolved, The Only Remaining Purpose of the Library Is as a Social Center." They note the increasing trend among faculty and students to use OCLC’s WorldCat or the RLG catalog rather than the local library’s catalog. "[I]f we had the copy it would show up first and if we didn’t, they would at least know it existed." Similarly, maintaining that the goal of an academic library is, indeed, to provide the entire universe of information to our clientele, Goodman reasons that almost every journal in the world will be used at some point in an academic library.

David Kohl (U. Cincinnati Digital Press) in his paper, "Mass Purchase versus Selection," presents the view that traditional access (i.e., ownership) to print journals was never very extensive to begin with. A study of Ohio academic libraries revealed that the average number of journal titles actually owned by a library was only around 25 percent of potentially useful titles. Kohl advocates the new model of acquisition (publisher packages) because it is consortial, inflation is negotiated, and the individual library pays a little more but gets a lot more for its money (including access to all of a publisher’s journals); all three elements benefit the library.

Vendor viewpoints also are well represented in this volume. Presenters include staff from Elsevier, EBSCO, Greenwood, John Wiley, Serials Solutions, and Total Information, Inc. Sensitive to the libraries’ financial dilemma, these vendors tend to concentrate on such topics as the history of publishing, the changing e-books market, and electronic archiving. Several provide updates of their online services, informational talks that also serve as instructional sessions useful to those of us "nontechies" who needed (at least in 2001) explanations of concepts and terminology (DOI, SFX, etc.)

Other paper topics include the "article economy" (the purchase of individual articles rather than journal subscriptions), OpenURL compliance for effective linking (the navigation tools for linking from database citations to journal Web sites to full-text articles and/or the OPAC), FAST CAT processing of materials, restoration of Oviatt Library and its collections at California State University after an earthquake, citation studies (finding that books are still important), recruitment into the profession, and the "new age" consortia. Also of note is the "Charleston Panel on Usage Statistics 2001," chaired by Denise M. Davis (National Commission on Libraries and Information Science). With the caveat that usage statistics themselves can be misleading, this paper includes valuable lists of Web sites related to issues of data collection and vendor–library statistics.

The overall message of the papers in this volume is one that encourages us to become comfortable with change. Technology, as it evolves, promises new and unknowable opportunities and possibilities, and current conflicts that cloud our vision (such as library–vendor divisions) will eventually be resolved. Librarianship today, with the ongoing revolution in the new digital information world order, is exciting; the whole world is changing in reaction and we have a front-row seat. But we must remember that technology is simply a tool that we need to harness for meeting the needs of libraries and their users. National meetings such as the Charleston Conference keep us up-to-date on professional issues needing to be addressed, and they stir up new ways of thinking about and analyzing what our users need, when they need it, where, and why. In terms of studying information-seeking behavior, we’ve not yet scratched the surface. As David Nicholas and Anthony Watkinson (City University, London) note in the subtitle of their paper "The Digital Information Player: We Have the Data But Not Yet the Understanding."—Shelley Arlen, University of Florida.