Katina Strauch shows off the Katina bobble-head presented to her in honor of he 25 years as conference organizer.

Eleanor Cook (Appalachian State University), Stephanie DuBose (East Carolina University), Stuart Grinell (Ambassador Books), Eve Davis (EBSCO), and Ann-Marie Breaux (YBP Library Services) have fun with freebies in the Vendor Visit skit.

Books and Serials Face
an Uncertain but Exciting Future

The 25th Charleston Conference,
November 2–5, 2005

The Charleston Conference—a stimulating forum for acquisitions librarians, book and periodical publishers, and system vendors that started out in 1980 as an informal gathering in Charleston, South Carolina—celebrated a quarter-century November 2–5 as the only major American library conference not sponsored by a professional or trade association. The final attendance figure of 995 broke all previous records.

Founded as a regional get-together by College of Charleston Head of Collection Development Katina Strauch, the conference now attracts international participants. Publishers, consultants, and journal aggregators view it as an opportunity to meet with librarians on an equal footing to address problems and share viewpoints. Programs continue from “beastly breakfast” in the morning through “lively lunches” to late in the afternoon, and vendor exhibits are confined to one five-hour slot on preconference day.

Even though it has grown, the conference’s organizers try to maintain a grassroots flavor. Strauch still opens the sessions by ringing a loud handbell. This year, a troupe of eight librarians and vendors performed two hilarious skits that satirized conference sessions and vendor visits to libraries: “Having you here today isn’t convenient,” says Acquisitions Librarian Squeaky Wheale. “After lunch we have a meeting on importing cuneiform characters into our serials subsystem.”

Libraries in transition

T. Scott Plutchak, director of the University of Alabama at Birmingham health sciences library, set the tone for the conference theme of “Things Are Seldom What They Seem” by declaring the imminent “end of libraries as we know them” as a good thing. “We have done a fabulous job of making it possible to have people get stuff without coming into the library,” he noted, “but we have lost the connection with people by staying in the building.” Plutchak said his library is involved in “going outside the building” by setting up liaisons with each academic medical department and offering the prize of an office party to any unit that adds the “ask-a-librarian” icon to its web page.

Google is often blamed as a primary reason why people don’t use the library, and the search engine company’s Tom Turvey appeared on two panels to explain both the Google Print Library Project and Google Scholar. Although he was reluctant to address the lawsuits by publisher’s groups, Turvey said the company’s intent was to serve as an “enhanced card catalog” for every book in every language. By making use of university collections, Google can provide access to the “65% or more of all books that have unclear copyright status-published after 1922, but not available for sale, or with rights reverting to the author.”

Mary Sauer-Games of ProQuest described the Google Library announcement in 2004 as a “scary headline,” since her company was also digitizing a huge number of titles. But she came to the realization that “publishing was not a Google expertise” and decided to go ahead with digital projects like the British 19th-century Parliamentary Papers, since ProQuest could provide better metadata than Google for keyword searches.

Bowker's Angela D’Agostino compared the threat that Google Scholar poses to serial publishers (a third-party search engine providing access to subscription-based content) with the alarm felt by Books in Print in 1995 when Amazon.com launched its online bookstore. “Amazon initially asked to use the BIP database,” she said. “Although they didn't want to pay for it, they offered us stock options, which we rejected. Who knew?” The immediate decline in BIP sales resulted in Bowker creating BooksInPrint.com, which now has a “nearly 100% renewal rate and vastly improved content.”

Practitioner paradise

Many Charleston Conference attendees said the reason they came was for practical knowledge focusing on collections. Here are some tidbits from some of the sessions:

Amy Carlson, serials librarian at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, described her experiences using Ebay as a collection development tool. The university used to have a no-Ebay policy, but fiscal policies were relaxed after a flash flood soaked thousands of documents, maps, and books. Carlson said the system works well for certain items unavailable elsewhere, and it's allowed the university to discover new purchasing sources.

The International Standards Organization is requiring a 13-number ISBN as of January 1, 2007, and catalogers, publishers, system vendors, and book jobbers need to phase in the new standard. Ann-Marie Breaux of YBP Library Services said it will “effectively double the number of ISBNs” by adding a “book industry identifier” of 978—or 979 when those run out—in front of the old number and recalculating the final check digit. Ted Fons of Innovative Interfaces pointed out that catalogers might have to shift from the traditional 020 MARC field for ISBNs to the 024 field that OCLC uses for the extended number.

Larry Portzline, a writer for the Pennsylvania Senate, enthused a large early-morning crowd with his ideas for bookstore tourism, a grassroots effort to support independent bookstores as a travel destination. For the past two years Portzline has been leading busloads of people on trips to stores in New York and Pennsylvania. “You have to see the reaction of these people to see how good this can be,” he said. “At the end of a long day visiting 22 different Greenwich Village bookstores, people are stumbling along exhausted, carrying dozens of books, and they can’t wait to do it again.” Portzline said there’s no reason why libraries can't partner with area bookstores and local authors to do the same thing and “bring together people who share the love of books.”

Daniel Mayer, volunteer CFO for the Wikimedia Foundation, answered questions from skeptical reference-book publishers and librarians about the authority and reliability of articles in the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. “It’s not an experiment in anarchy or radical democracy,” he explained, “although we do have a reputation as anticredentialists.” Mayer said there is an open-door review and change process for any entry as well as an arbitration process for conflict resolution on controversial topics. University of Michigan Humanities Librarian Scott Dennis chimed in that Wikipedia is often more comprehensive than print encyclopedias for such popular-culture topics as TV shows.

Rick Anderson, director of resource acquisition at the University of Nevada at Reno, warned that scam vendors are getting more aggressive, calling student employees at academic libraries, sending out fake renewal invoices, merely offering to “verify an address,” and sometimes threatening legal action. His best advice was to “be strong” with them—“if you didn't order it, don't pay for it.”

The next Charleston Conference will be held November 8–11, 2006. Visit the conference website for details.—George Eberhart.