CHLA 2007 Wednesday 30th May

Here is a brief report of what was a very full start to the CHLA conference in Ottawa this week.
As with the MLA conference, there were some continuing education offerings on Monday and Tuesday before the conference proper started on Wednesday. On Tuesday, the UK coordinator of Chasing the Sun, John Loy, and I had a meeting with a lengthy agenda (the usual for our irregular face-to-face meetings!). We discussed the developments in the QuestionPoint software and went through the paper on Chasing the Sun and training session material for later in the conference. There was a 6pm "getting to know you" function for first time attendees to the CHLA meetings, which was fun. As an ice-breaker we were all taught the salsa. I'm a changed woman. The exhibition opened on Tuesday evening. I'd taken most of the display material for the ICML 2009 Brisbane with me, and assembled it in the exhibition area, where even at the opening it attracted quite a bit of attention.
Three keynote speakers supplied the morning programme on Wednesday: Greg Notess from Montana State University spoke on using the best of both web 1.0 and web 2.0. Web 2.0 applications offer some interesting flexibility in the way services can be delivered, and Greg demonstrated a couple of sites / applications which could be useful. See http://www.slideshare.com/ – a site which enables sharing powerpoint slides and Scribd – an alternative to pdf files. Greg also demonstrated embedding files on web pages, which while meaning that the embedded document is always current, it takes away the evidence of where it’s from, giving rise to questions of quality assurance and authenticating sources. Embedded items are not trawled by all search engines.
Greg also mentioned custom search engines such as healia http://www.healia.com/healia/ in the health area, but stressed that these are still in beta stages, so we’ll have to wait to see if they will last in their current forms. However, customisation of search engines will probably be a development to watch.
One interesting beta site is Google Co-op which includes different subject areas, one of which is health. Contributors’ credentials can be seen, and some key organisations such as the Mayo Clinic are starting to get involved. http://www.google.com/coop/
And Greg made some comments about federated search engines: they don’t always do a thorough job and can be superficial, and because of the scope of what they’re doing, they’re SLOW, and don’t always produce the concise results required by a quick search.
Heather Joseph from SPARC – www.arl.org/sparc gave an excellent summary of the state of play in the area of open access publication. She feels that it’s now in the mainstream and is here to stay, but the models of scholarly publication are still undergoing change. Recommended reading on OA and the gains to the community: Steve Lawrence (2001) Nature 411 (6837) 521. Gunther Eysenbach has also published in PLoS Biology. See also the sites of OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) and DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals). Heather felt that one of the big issues for authors was retaining copyright rights of their articles: SPARC has produced an Author Addendum which authors can add to publishers’ contracts in which they require that the copyright remains with them. (Of course, not all publishers like this approach. Authors unite!)
Cameron Macdonald from NRC Press, a smallish Canadian publisher (his words), had a hard act to follow. As a publisher, he saw his main clients to be the authors, who, of course, want their works to be read. Cameron covered that thorny issue of mandatory open access to publically-funded research results, indicating that publishers did need to cover their costs and somehow these costs need to be met in the publishing continuum. He mentioned the ‘A’ word – Advertising!! and brought up the issue of potential conflicts of interest in peer review. Would OA improve the peer review process?
Three afternoon sessions I attended provided three case studies of provincial health libraries forming consortia of various sizes for various purposes – resource sharing and joint purchasing being the two prime movers. The quote of the afternoon came from the Ontario Public Health Libraries Association: “Availability more than quality determines which information resources will be used.” Not all worthwhile resources are necessarily available on the internet! We know that, but it’s nice to have it confirmed occasionally.
The final session of the day was a reception in the poster area and presentation of poster awards.
Today, someone said that the occasional personal note was okay in a blog. Okay. It's 11.20pm now. Can I go to bed?? Night!
Mary.