Transforming Serials: The Revolution Continues[Proceedings of the North American Serials Interest Group Inc.17th Annual Conference June 20‐23, 2002,The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia]

Citation

Sweeney, L. (2004), "Transforming Serials: The Revolution Continues[Proceedings of the North American Serials Interest Group Inc.17th Annual Conference June 20‐23, 2002,The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia]", New Library World, Vol. 105 No. 5/6, pp. 232-234. https://doi.org/10.1108/03074800410536676

These are the 17th Conference proceedings of NASIG and as such the contents of this book reflect the current concerns and diverse interests of the serials community in North America. The papers and workshop sessions cover, just to mention a few topics, Web portals, digitised materials, open URL and SFX linking, abandoning print to e‐access, serials surveys, future of cataloguing, transforming AACR2. The field is wide and various. The book is a collection of Conference proceedings and as such follows the set format:

The two pre‐conference programs both addressed the changing world of serials.

The first session entitled, “Implementing MARC21”, was a comprehensive line by line, field by field explanation of the coding and tagging for MARC 21.

Stefanie Wittenbach's session, “Everything you always wanted to know about electronic journals and were afraid to ask”, was a good basic introduction to the areas of consideration when managing e‐journals with particular reference to the areas of acquisition, processing and collection development. It was very much aimed at those new to managing e‐journals.

Plenary sessions

Howard Strauss presented his paper entitled, “Web portals: the future of information access and distribution”. This was an informative paper that explored the whole idea of Web portals and provided some clearer definitions than I have come across before, “… a portal is a user‐centric customized, personalized, adaptive desktop (CPAD)”. Howard encourages all enterprises including libraries to build their own portals and provides a bullet‐point list of the dos and don'ts when you embark on such an initiative.

In her session, “Serial challenges and solutions: the view from the director's chair”, Emily Mobley examines the challenges that the pricing of serials present to us, with particular reference to sci‐tech journals. Scientific journals have always been more expensive than in other disciplines but are currently averaging at about six times the cost of journals in other specialties. This paper examines the historical and commercial reasons why this is the case and then investigates some possible solutions to the problem and predicts some possible outcomes of current initiatives. Intriguingly she ends with the warning, “ … a new paradigm for scholarly communication in the sciences is on its way”.

David Seaman's session. “The future of digitised materials: where have we been and where are we going”, is recorded in the book by a third party and loses something, I feel, in the recording. The session discussed the future of e‐publishing.

Concurrent sessions

The ten concurrent sessions covered a multitude of subjects from the future of multi‐media cataloguing and journal linking, to the future of scholarly publishing models, the cancelling of print journals and the move to e‐access. Several of these were again recorded by third parties rather than being the original presenter's paper.

Workshops

There are accounts of the 27 workshops that covered diverse subjects and raised some revolutionary ideas such as the abandoning of serials check‐in and the questioning of the need for cataloguing. However consistent themes of managing and adapting to change emerged as did the enthusiasm of the creature that is the serials librarian for wrestling with the anomalies and challenges that serials present on a day‐to‐day basis.

The book covers a wide variety of concerns that are of relevance to all of us working in the field. Such a conference allows time for speculation and for some forecasting of the future which is thought‐provoking and inspiring to everyone who works in the serials business not just librarians but publishers and subscription agents too. However I have to say that a collection of conference papers, some of which are recorded second‐hand, does not lend itself to an easy read. It was very much a book to dip in to and it did have a reasonable index to allow for delving into one's own particular areas of interest. The book also provides a list of registrants that is something of a Who's Who of the North American serials industry.