---

Even in today’s world of blogs, wikis, discussion lists, and other Internet applications, attendance at academic conferences remains one of the best methods available for keeping up. What the academic conference gives up to Internet applications in immediacy, it more than makes up in quality and in the greater concentration of useful information presented. Unfortunately, given tight library budgets and skyrocketing fuel prices, attendance at these conferences is becoming increasingly difficult for many librarians. Moreover, even in the best of times, only a limited number of librarians are able to attend any given conference. While nothing compares to the experience of attending an academic conference in person and spending time conversing with your peers, the publication of conference proceedings helps to broaden the availability of the material presented.

The North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG), in cooperation with Haworth Information Press, has been doing just this since the first NASIG conference in 1986. The annual proceedings of each NASIG conference are published each year as a volume of The Serials Librarian and simultaneously as a monograph that is available separately. These proceedings contain nearly all of the presentations given at that year’s conference, allowing the geographically or fiscally challenged librarian to benefit from the conference.

Each presentation is presented either as a formal paper provided by the presenter or in the form of a summary transcript recorded by a NASIG conference attendee. Each format has its benefits. The formal papers often include citations and figures or charts provided by the presenter. Sessions that are summarized by a recorder usually add a section on any post-presentation discussion or questions.

Each volume begins with some common front matter including a listing of NASIG officers, scholarship recipients, an “About the Editors” section, a table of contents, and an introduction. Back matter includes a short description of the poster presentations, lists of attendees by last name and by affiliation, and a topical index. In between, each volume divides the presentations into sections for “Preconference Programs,” “Vision Sessions,” “Strategy Sessions,” and “Tactics Sessions.” Vision sessions used to be known as plenary sessions and are scheduled to avoid conflicts with any other sessions. Vision sessions tend to look at big-picture issues from outside the world of serials. Strategy sessions involve broad issues of interest to all or most players in the serials world. Tactics sessions are more practical and focused.

Each year the conference takes its theme from the host city for the conference. Thus the 2004 conference, held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was themed “Growth, Creativity, and Collaboration: Great Visions on a Great Lake.” The 2005 conference, held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was themed “Roaring into Our 20’s,” reflecting both the fact that the conference is the twentieth-annual NASIG conference as well as Minneapolis’s proximity to the “roaring” Mississippi River. The 2006 conference, held in Denver, Colorado, was themed “Mile-High Views: Surveying the Serials Vista.”

The 2004 conference proceedings, Growth, Creativity, and Collaboration: Great Visions on a Great Lake, contains thirty-nine sessions comprising three preconference sessions, five vision sessions, twelve strategy sessions, and nineteen tactics sessions. The preconference reports include Steven Miller presenting the beginning of the Serials Cataloging Cooperative Training Program’s “Integrating Resources Cataloging Workshop.” Miller focused the session on electronic integrating resources such as updating Web sites and databases. Nancy Slight-Gibney, Virginia Taffurelli, and Mary Iber presented a preconference session titled “Budgeting Lesson and Stories” on the way their three very different libraries approached their respective serials budget crunches. Each provided ideas on how a library can maintain and even expand usage during a period of serials cancellations. In my opinion, the gem of the preconferences was Susan Davis and Beverly Geer’s “Serialist Boot Camp.” This session provided an excellent overview of the entirety of serials work and should be required reading for librarians in areas other than serials as well as for new serials librarians and library students.

The vision sessions began strongly with an interview with Matthew Battles, the author of Library: An Unquiet History, conducted by Adrian Alexander of the Greater Western Library Alliance. Battles discussed the role that libraries and librarians should play in our society. The central part of his argument is that “librarians [should] be heard as the public intellectuals of their communities, be that an academic community or the community at large” (45–46). The other four vision sessions consist of two sets of two. Kenneth Frazier and Loretta Ebert offer alternative takes on the cost effectiveness of Big Deal licensing agreements. Frazier, in his session “What’s the Big Deal?” questions whether the Big Deal is the solution to rising journal costs and describes how he avoids them at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Libraries. Ebert, by contrast, explains how she was able to make use of a Big Deal licensing agreement to affordably expand journal access at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Library through consortia bargaining in “What’s the Big Deal? ‘Take 2’ or, How to Make It Work for You …” The final pair of vision sessions involves two takes on alternative publishing. Heather Joseph, the president of BioOne, surveys the alternative publishing landscape and examines the various approaches currently being used. John Tagler of Elsevier responds in “Alternative Scholarly Publishing: A Commercial Publisher’s Perspective.”

The first four papers in the strategy sessions section come from a joint presentation on the business of scholarly publishing. October Ivins, Bill Kasdorf, and Keith Seitter explain the economics of the scholarly publishing business and the process through which journals are published, and discuss the dilemma that small academic publishers face when confronted with deciding whether to offer their journals in print, electronically, or both. The three of them finish by offering librarians some advice of how they can support small academic publishers. Other sessions include discussions of managing electronic resources and the costs associated with maintaining them, journal pricing, the image of librarians, open access, and two sessions dealing with journal publications by scholarly societies.

The papers contained in the “Tactics Session” section cover a wide variety of areas within serials librarianship and publishing. Yvette Diven, Cathy Jones, Rick Anderson, and Jane White address collaboration and cooperation between librarians and serials vendors. Sandhya Srivastava and Nancy Linden discuss their experiences in fostering collaboration between librarians and faculty in serials collection management that results in a better focused serials collection as well as a higher degree of trust and respect between the two groups. Other tactics sessions dealt with serials cataloging, budget issues, managing electronic resources, usage statistics, issues of interest to public serials librarians, and the Divine/Faxon/Rowecom bankruptcy.

The 2005 conference proceedings, Roaring into Our 20’s: NASIG 2005, contains thirty-five sessions comprising three preconference sessions, two vision sessions, twelve strategy sessions, and eighteen tactics sessions. The preconference reports include another Serials Cooperative Cataloging Training Program workshop, this time their “Serials Holdings Workshop” presented by Catherine Nelson and Julie Su. The second preconference report is on Adam Chesler, Phil Greene, and Kim Maxwell’s session titled “Serials Esperanto: Helping Librarians, Vendors and Publishers Understand Each Other.” The presenters, each representing one of the parties above, took turns explaining the history of their constituency’s involvement in the serials process as well as the unique difficulties that each group faces. In the final preconference, “How to Avoid Death by Meeting: Strategies for Better Meetings,” Betty Kjellberg offers tools that can be used to make meetings more effective. Kjellberg discusses how to prepare a better agenda, the development of a culture that expects meetings to begin on time and stay on topic, the role of the meeting scribe, and methods that can be used to help groups work through issues.

The two vision sessions were Marshall Keys’s “Chaotic Transitions: How Today’s Trends Will Affect Tomorrow’s Libraries” and Leif Utne’s “Painting America Purple: Media Democracy and the Red/Blue Divide.” Keys looks at a number of trends affecting libraries, several of which he identifies as “critical for 2005 and the next ten years” (30). These trends include the rise of a blogging culture, technological changes in cell phones that put enormous computing power in patrons’ pockets, the ever-changing nature of intellectual property law, and RSS feeds. Keys ends by forecasting that over the next twenty years librarians will need to design “library services for a digital way of life” (36). Utne discussed the role of journalists and librarians “in promoting democratic dialogue” (38) and the importance of this dialogue, and he explained how the Utne Reader has been involved in promoting such discussion. Utne also touched upon the transformative effect of the Internet in fostering dialogue and disseminating information.

The twelve strategy sessions in this volume cover a wide variety of issues. Oliver Pesch and Alfred Kraemer present a two-session sequence on collecting and managing usage statistics for electronic resources. Pesch’s session, “Ensuring Consistent Usage Statistics, Part 1: Project COUNTER” provides a history of Project COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources) as well as a description of its purpose, usage, and the various reports available from COUNTER–compliant electronic resource vendors. Kraemer goes on in “Ensuring Consistent Usage Statistics, Part 2: Working with Use Data for Electronic Journals” to describe the sudden shift from heavy print to heavy electronic usage he observed at the Medical College of Wisconsin Library and some of the problems associated with collecting and utilizing usage statistics for electronic serials. Presentations by Amy Brand and Jenny Walker deal with metasearch tools, or federated searching as it is sometimes called. Other strategy sessions in this volume look at cataloging, alternative access, institutional repositories, and the licensing of electronic resources.

The eighteen tactics sessions recorded in the volume are also quite varied. Lucy Duhon and Jeanne Langendorfer present a session on serials binding titled, “Binding Journals in Tight Times: Mind the Budget,” which explores the issue and discusses how the question of binding is being addressed at the University of Toledo and Bowling Green State University libraries. Many familiar topics are included in this volume’s “Tactics Sessions” section including federated searching, providing and maintaining access to electronic resources, scholarly communications, open access, and Big Deals. Tina Buck, Stephen Headley, and Abby Schor continue Headley’s 2004 efforts to increase the discussion of public library issues at NASIG conferences by presenting “Collection Development in Public Libraries.” Paoshan Yue and Araby Greene go beyond Keys’s vision session to offer the first truly Web 2.0 presentation in the three volumes under review with “Do You See RSS in Your Future?” Finally, Beth Bernhardt breaks things up by offering a little practical advice in “Presentations That Keep Your Audience Interested and Awake.”

The 2006 conference proceedings, Mile-High Views: Surveying the Serials Vista, contains thirty-three sessions comprising four preconference programs, three vision sessions, eleven strategy sessions, and fifteen tactics sessions. The 2006 conference continues the trend of offering Serials Cataloging Cooperative Training Program workshops as preconference sessions. This time both the “Basic Serials Cataloging Workshop” and the “Advanced Serials Cataloging Workshop” were offered by Joseph Hinger and Steve Shadle respectively. Tim Jewell, Trisha Davis, and Diane Grover presented on managing licenses for electronic resources, and Carol Hixson discussed how to set up an online institutional repository using her experience at the University of Oregon as a model.

Vision sessions included Robin Sloan of Current TV, one of the originators of the viral video EPIC 2015, discussing a version of the future where, as he puts it in his title, “Things Fall Apart.” After Sloan showed the audience EPIC 2015, a transcript of which is contained in the proceedings, he continues the theme forward into a dark vision of 2016 in which a designer virus is unleashed upon mankind. In the end he explains that information is morally neutral, that “it’s people that make a difference in the world, for good or ill” (66). Brenda Bailey-Hainer presented a session on digitization entitled “All the News That’s Fit to Digitize: Creating Colorado’s Historic Newspaper Collection.” She includes not only a description of the project but details on the funding model and future plans for the project. To round out the vision sessions, T. Scott Plutchak discussed the coming transition to a culture based on the digital transmission of information as opposed to print distribution in “What’s a Serial When You’re Running on Internet Time?”

Plutchak’s discussion is carried forward in the strategy sessions by Roger Schonfeld and the team of Colleen Carlton, John Kiplinger, and Nancy Kushigan. They looked at the issues of strategic library planning and the creation of a paper repository backup for electronic serial resources in “Getting from Here to There, Safely: Library Strategic Planning for the Transition Away from Print Journals” and “The UC/JSTOR Paper Repository: Progress Thus Far.” Other sessions include a two-session sequence on identifying and meeting user’s serials needs by Lynn Connaway and Regina Reynolds, and sessions on serials cataloging and open-access journals.

Tactics sessions in the 2006 volume include, as usual, a wide array of topics, including a comparison of the costs of print and electronic serials by Richard Fidczuk and Linda Beebe, as well as sessions on open access; workflow, project, and personnel management; and linking the library’s electronic resources to your institution’s course management system (e.g., Blackboard or Web CT). Abigail Bordeaux’s session “Blogs, Wikis and Podcasts: Social Software in the Library” explores ways to use Web 2.0 applications to reach out to your patrons.

These three NASIG conference proceedings provide the reader with a valuable snapshot of the serials field in the year of their publication. Each volume covers a wide range of topics in the area and provides instructive reading for the advanced, as well as the novice, serials librarian. The volumes themselves are well bound and expertly produced. The NASIG proceedings are a valuable addition to the field.