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On June 7th, I flew out to Albuquerque, New Mexico for the NASIG Conference, and for my last NASIG Executive Board meeting as Past President–completing my three year stint as Vice President/President/Past President–even though the conference-proper ran from June 9th to 12th. My duties as Board liaison to our Conference Planning Committee and as fundraising coordinator (a job that goes to the Past President and involves soliciting sponsors and vendors at our expo) meant that I was often too busy to attend conference programs, but I did manage to make it to a few interesting sessions, which I will highlight.

T. Scott Plutchak, the Director of Digital Curation Strategies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, delivered the conference’s initial plenary address (or as NASIG calls it, a Vision Session) entitled “Dialectic On the Aims of Institutional Repositories. Plutchak talked about two articles about institutional repositories (or IRs), one by Raym Crow from 2002 and the other by Clifford Lynch from 2003, to frame his discussion of how IRs have developed over the intervening decade-plus. In Plutchak’s reading, Crow is interested in using IRs to challenge traditional models of scholarly publishing and to use IRs to demonstrate the importance of faculty research. Lynch, on the other hand, wants to use IRs to provide access to new types of digital scholarship, to preserve material that might be lost, and is primarily interested in transforming scholarly communication, not scholarly publishing, per Plutchak. In the years since these articles were published, IRs have grown to host a wide variety of content, and there is increased awareness in academic circles of the importance of preserving data. Traditional peer review has continued in various publishing models, including Green Open Access models. Crow’s concern about using IRs to demonstrate the importance of faculty research has fallen by the wayside. Plutchak points out that this was a good idea at the time, but it hasn’t really held up, and that IRs are not necessarily a good way to showcase faculty research. However, IRs can be very good as research management systems that provide metadata about and general preservation and management of faculty research. Plutchak then addressed what he sees as the inner contradictions of the Green Open Access model, which he argued is parasitic on traditional non-open access journals, because it relies on a robust environment of peer-reviewed journals. Accordingly, it is not an effective transition model, because the OA models will always be outnumbered by the non-OA journals. Furthermore, he argued that it is intellectually dishonest for librarians to tell publishers that embargoes aren’t needed to protect their business interests, when we know that a lack of embargoes threatens their business model. Plutchak further criticized the Green OA model by noting that OA journals may not provide the best version of an article for the users needs. It may provide an acceptable version, but not the version of record. With these considerations in mind, Plutchak argued that we need to reassess the role of open access in institutional repositories (which may be better suited to managing research and data).

Another interesting session I attended was “The Canadian Linked Data Initiative: Charting a Path to a Linked Data Future,” presented by Marlene van Ballegooie, Juliya Borie, and Andrew Senior. They discussed how, in September 2015, the five largest research libraries in Canada (University of Toronto, University of British Columbia, McGill University, Universite de Montreal, University of Alberta) formed a joint initiative to develop a path toward linked data. They were inspired, in large measure, by the American group Linked Data for Production, or LD4P, which consists of six large institutions. The Canadian libraries realized that they were somewhat behind the curve and needed to catch up, while recognizing that such an large undertaking cannot be accomplished by one institution on its own. The group has developed a number of cross-institutional working groups to coordinate their activities, which primarily are focused on educating and training their staffs about linked data issues. They also have a BIBFRAME Editor Working Group, which is investigating how to make practical use of the BIBFRAME Editor tool developed by Library of Congress as well as the BIBFRAME Scribe tool developed by Zepheira. The presentation got more technical than I can really get into here, but my big takeaway from this session was the importance of collaborating with other institutions to facilitate learning and training about linked data, because the members of the initiative are right: this is too big a think for any one institution to tackle.

Overall, the conference seemed to be well received, and the worst management issue I had to tackle as Past President and liaison to Conference Planning was a recurring struggle with the hotel management to keep the bar open later than 10:30 pm. I’m relieved to have rotated off the Executive Board, but I’m not quite out of the woods yet, as I’m going to chair the Program Planning Committee for next year’s conference. Out of the frying pan, etc.