Friday 7 November 2008

Blog from the Charleston Conference

The Charleston Conference opened on Thursday November 6 with a quite excellent keynote from Derek Law.

In a funny, articulate and engaging talk Derek examined the issues around collection development in today's world. One of his central messages was that there is too much focus on the formal research literature and not enough on all the other stuff out there.

Of particular note, Derek described 'digital crossover strategy' (also known as crossing your fingers!) but the serious message was that scholarship needs a robust mechanism by which to preserve and curate the rapidly expanding born digital outputs... and it doesn't have one.

As an aside, a takeaway sound bite was that King's college saved $1 million per year in heating bills alone by closing four floors of it's library. Golly.

No comments:

Post a Comment