Charleston Conference Day Two

      A good day of conference meetings. The conference is hosted at the historic Francis Marion Hotel in downtown Charleston, which is a very nice hotel. The morning speakers talked about the evolving world of journal and academic publishing, and the curious place of Google Scholar in the world of academic libraries. Independent and self-publishing was extolled, the current and future state of e-books and e-publishing generally was much mused and discussed. During the lunch hour (after a quick dash to 5 Guys Burgers) I attended a discussion roundtable on "What keeps librarians up at night" - no, it was not about how to deal with noisy college student neighbors, rather about worrisome issues facing collection development librarians. 

Then on to a less-satisfying presentation about finding a middle ground between 'general' and 'special' collections. It might have been more interesting if I worked at a research university, as they talked a lot about research data sets, like census data or other statistical measures. The last session today was a lot more fun - librarians from UTC gave a report on their 3-year long project to identify and remove 35,000+ books from the collection prior to the move into a brand new library building. According to the presenter, one professor (no name given) stood up in a faculty senate meeting and screamed at them his objection to the removal of any books from the collection. The 35K count was about 9% of the whole collection. Lighten up, prof!
      This evening, I'm off to have dinner with my colleagues and reps from Credo Reference. That's the best kind of library swag! Might go to the annual Reception, unless I'm too tired.