Curious what you missed at Charleston Conference? Here, Tom Beyer and Marc Segers share the news, the buzz, and the trends…
- PDA (minds out of the gutter, people—we’re talking Patron-Driven Access. Puzzled? Check out this great post on Inside Higher Ed). People are experimenting with many different models and from the looks of it, there won’t necessarily be a winner. Instead, this becomes a continuum of requirements that, ranging from pay-per-view to subscription, give more control to users while allowing librarians to keep budgetary control.
- Very interesting news from Google Books. They will be releasing an API to allow external people to data mine content. This should unleash a fascinating set of applications over the next few years.
- A great deal of interest in combining text with data.
- Frances Pinter of Bloomsbury Academic presented a more fleshed out description of her model to fund academic monographs.
- Excellent panel from Robert Faber (OUP), Will Wheeler (Librarian at Georgetown University) and Martha Sedgewick (SAGE) [led by Marc Segers!] on breaking down content silos.
- Amazed by the number of librarians who got up early on a Saturday morning to get a preview of SRMO. Kudos! We (and our friends at SAGE) were positively flattered.
- Great feedback on the talk that Veruschka Selbach from Earthscan [and Tom Beyer] gave on the implications of providing content to users at the chunk level using the Earth Library as a case study.
- Very interesting data from John Sacks at Highwire on survey results of how professors and researchers at Stanford use online products.
- Some big questions emerged: How will mobile technology impact academic research? How do scholars want to use mobile technology? [What are YOUR thoughts?]
- Last but not least, an interesting piece of information…apparently users prefer to read PDFs over HTML pages. What about you? Prefer PDF over HTML? [Psst...we have ideas for how to improve the reading experience in HTML, for PubFactory.]
That’s it for this conference summary. Check back in a few weeks for a London Online wrap-up. iFactory is exhibiting (booth X04 in the XML Pavilion) AND, we’re celebrating a pretty big launch with some friends of ours. Yep. We’re leaving you hanging!
