At Charleston, Content Is King

摘要

At South Carolina's 27th Annual Charleston Conference, held November 7-10, librarians, publishers, and vendors gathered to talk about trends in academic libraries, and the consensus was clear: content is king. Under the theme "What Tangled Webs We Weave," the conference drew 1,144 attendees, roughly 56 percent librarians, 18 percent vendors and aggregators, and 15 percent publishers. For librarians, the focus on content included freeing more information from OPACs; creating strategies to collect, preserve, and make available new forms of nontraditional content and data; helping students and faculty better navigate the full expanse of the web; and developing metrics. For publishers and vendors, the conversation revolved around making content more available outside of traditional containers and more "discoverable" on the web; finding ways to open their works to text and data-mining; and making content more searchable and less obscured by the current, clunky system of authentication, multiple interfaces, and proprietary digital rights management (DRM).