The 27th annual conference of the North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) was held at the Sheraton Music City Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee, from June 7–10, 2012. The theme of the 2012 conference was “Creating Harmony from Dis-Chord,” which highlighted our musical heritage. Librarians, vendors, and publishers came together to continue to strive to create harmony from the many competing and sometimes seemingly discordant notes in the current serials world; to work together to provide services and content effectively to library patrons. Conference attendees were enveloped by the welcoming environment and melodic atmosphere of the Music City. As these proceedings reveal, the possibilities for creating harmony seem endless.
NASIG President Steven Shadle opened the conference by welcoming participants and introduced Ross MacIntyre, Chair of the United Kingdom Serials Group (UKSG), who brought greetings from our sibling organization. Dr. Wayne Moore, historian and archivist, provided attendees with an excellent historical overview of Nashville and the surrounding area in his presentation titled “The Colorful History of Music City, USA.” Some of the highlights of the talk included a fascinating discussion of Nashville as a trading post, a civil war participant, as Athens of the South, a shipping port, a state capital, and of course, as a center for the music industry. Many of the 414 conference attendees took advantage of the delightful southeastern environment to enjoy mouthwatering appetizers and scrumptious desserts at the opening reception and the first timers/mentoring reception. In addition to regular conference activities, participants had the opportunity to attend a vendor expo, six poster sessions, a variety of informal discussion sessions, and a wonderful reception at the Country Music Hall of Fame. A well-attended lively discussion of the Report from the Taskforce on Core Competencies for Electronic Resources Librarians was led by Sarah Sutton. There were also several marvelous opportunities to go line dancing, to sample Tennessee cuisine and hospitality, and to enjoy country music at various establishments including the Country Music Festival that was held concurrently in downtown Nashville.
Four half-day preconference sessions readied attendees for the main conference. Judith A. Kuhagen returned again this year and delivered a new preconference “RDA and Serials: Theoretical and Practical Applications” for those wishing to attend a thorough, engaging training session on Resource Description and Access (RDA). Through the preconference, “Making the Leap to Mid-Management,” Micheline Westfall, Kay G. Johnson, and Molly Royse offered an occasion for those who for one reason or another have found themselves making the leap into mid-management to benefit from the knowledge and experience of three middle management academic librarians with significant experience. In the third preconference, “Hands on with Drupal: Making a Licensing Database” Amanda Yesilbas presented beginning Drupal users with the knowledge to put together a simple Drupal site for content management and the creation of an online license tracking database. “E-Book Cataloging Workshop: Hands-On Training using RDA” was the title of the fourth and final preconference. It was an e-book cataloging workshop in which Marielle Veve and Wanda Rosiński provided a hands-on opportunity for participants to create original machine-readable cataloging (MARC) records for e-books using Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Second Edition (AACR2) and RDA.
NASIG members were fortunate to have the opportunity to attend three thought-provoking, stimulating, and exciting vision sessions with three energetic and vibrant speakers. Dr. Lynn Silipigni Connaway, co-author of “The Digital Information Seeker: Report of Findings from Selected OCLC, RIN and JISC User Behavior Projects” (2010) presented the first session on Friday morning. The title “Why the Internet is More Attractive than the Library” was definitely an attention getter and the speaker did not fail to deliver. Dr. Connaway discussed common themes that have emerged from several studies that examined library user attitudes toward the library and user information-seeking behavior, and then she presented key issues for librarians. Kevin Smith, the Director of Scholarly Communications at Duke University and the second dynamic vision session speaker, delivered an informative talk titled “Copyright in a Digital Age: Conflict, Risk, and Reward.” He discussed copyright law and its relationship to new technologies and libraries. The third and final energizing vision session speaker was Rick Anderson, the Associate Dean for Scholarly Resources and Collections at the J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah. His talk “Is the Journal Dead? Possible Futures for Serial Scholarship” challenged the audience to think about possible futures of serials and scholarly communication and to think about how we can be useful in the transformation, how we can step up and become part of the exciting changes that lie ahead.
Instead of the strategy and tactics sessions of previous years, the 2012 conference had twenty-seven one-hour program sessions on a variety of topics of interest to the NASIG membership. Many of the sessions built on the musical theme of the conference and had titles with musical symbolism like “Teaching Wild Horses to Sing: Managing the Deluge of Electronic Serials” or “Managing E-Publishing: Perfect Harmony for Serialists.” There were several sessions on topics related to collection development and evaluation as well as sessions on the various metrics that could be used for decision making related to print, e-journals, and e-books. In one session, presenters described problems, decision points, and solutions developed along the way for everything from selecting, ordering, licensing, to cataloging and providing access to individual e-books and e-book collections. Another presentation examined collection and services evaluation methods used to assess the ability of a library to support a new graduate program. Multiple methods of assessment, including analysis of usage statistics, student satisfaction surveys, interlibrary loan and article delivery services statistics, and citation analysis were discussed. In another program the presenter described the use of a model for determining the value of e-resources for a community of users in order to make informed cancellation and purchase decisions. The model uses a combination of metrics encompassing content coverage, usage, patron needs and feedback, and costs. The important topic of effectively managing usage data was covered by one report that provided details of research into what statistics librarians collect and how the data is used. Of the other sessions related to metrics, one examined the use of statistics and other metrics for “Big Deal” deconstruction, one focused on the creation of custom do-it-yourself citation analysis, and another session scrutinized how librarians, publishers, and subscription agents use various metrics, including usage statistics and alternative metrics, to demonstrate return on investment (ROI). Three program sessions were devoted to Web-scale discovery. Two of the programs presented descriptions and innovations to online discovery tools, Summon and JSTOR, while the third offered strategies for evaluating and improving discovery without expensive software and programming. Several sessions tackled questions related to managing electronic resources including dealing with the volume of electronic serials acquired and available; implementing electronic resource management (ERM) systems including open source systems like the Centralized Online Resource and Licensing (CORAL) system; and examining why, after implementing ERM systems, users are still having difficulties acquiring required information. Four sessions focused on serialists' involvement in the scholarly communication arena. Two of the presentations were related to library publishing activities; one described managing a library publishing operation while the other presented a case study outlining the process by which a print journal was transformed into an online journal. Of the two sessions on institutional repositories one focused on practical steps smaller institutions could follow to create an institutional repository and the other focused on next steps to improve repositories after initial development. Two sessions tackled the use of mobile devices in libraries. One session discussed the use of mobile websites, mobile devices like smartphones, website designs, and various apps and frameworks while the other session examined the use of e-book readers and potential uses of mobile technology in libraries. Cataloging sessions were popular again this year and the sessions on Cooperative Online Serials (CONSER) serial RDA workflow, cataloging federal government serial publications, and automated metadata creation were of considerable interest to conference attendees. One very engaging session was on developing and improving negotiation skills. The remaining program sessions covered a variety of topics, including standards, the request for proposal (RFP) process, digitization projects, and video journals. The standards session discussed the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) and the Identification of E-Journals (PIE-J) projects. In the RFP session, a subscription agent and a librarian discussed their viewpoints and provided tips on completing an RFP process for subscription services. The Vermont Digital Newspaper Project was spotlighted in the session on digitization and the use of scholarly video journals to increase productivity by researchers was the focus of the session on video journals.
The Proceedings are documentation of NASIG's annual conference and would not be possible without the significant contributions of individual members who generously give their time as presenters, authors, and recorders to produce a record of the intellectual activities of our organization. We are especially appreciative of their efforts and also gratefully recognize the hard work of the Program Planning Committee and the Conference Planning Committee in creating the successful conference upon which this volume is based. The editors would like to extend special thanks to the Executive Board and our organization's elected officers for their leadership and to acknowledge the support provided to us by our Executive Board liaison, Allyson Zellner, and the staff at Taylor & Francis.
Sharon Dyas-Correia
Sara Bahnmaier
Guest Editors