Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President, Membership and Research, Chief Strategist, OCLC, began with an overview of three contextual areas where our environment is changing: colleges, consortia, collections. Libraries are not ends in themselves. A shift from a collection-centric to an engagement-centric model supports goals of its institutions: research, careers, and education. New skills involve backgrounds and stakeholders. Many institutions are sharpening their focus: increasing emphasis on consortia tradeoffs between autonomy and consolidation. More consolidation leads to a better user experience. Optimization is better done locally because it is possible to get close to users. Because libraries are driven by local concerns, they can have control.
Alicia Wise, Director & Consultant, Information Power Ltd. focused on our open future and asked how we can make it work. We need to pool creativity and risk. The key to getting there: more money, cancelling big deals, rising university presses, community infrastructure. People are the key: come together to craft something new and fresh. We need a diverse array of opinions. Societies are feeling pressured because of inadequate resources. Publishers are interested in learning about the challenges and find a way through them.
Jason Price, Director of Licensing Services, SCELC Library Consortium, said that moving to OA will save 70% of costs. We need to change how the money flows. A huge challenge for the future of scholarly publishing is the “read to publish funding gap”. More content that libraries paid for is becoming open access; some estimates are that 50% of the articles will increase to OA. Who will pay for the gap? Not authors! The best strategy is to collaborate or do it alone.
Don Hawkins blogs about conferences for Information Today and Against The Grain. He also maintains the Conference Calendar on the Information Today website and is the Editor of Personal Archiving: Preserving Our Digital Heritage, published by Information Today in 2013, and Co-Editor of Public Knowledge: Access and Benefits, published by Information Today in 2016. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and has worked in the information industry for over 45 years.
