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Well, the latest few PD blog posts have guilted me into finally writing about my trip to the 2015 NC Serials Conference. Now, if I can just find my notes …

Aha! Here we are.

Steve’s post already covered Katherine Skinner’s opening keynote address quite well. I’ll add an “Aha” moment I had. Do you know who invented the incandescent light bulb? Hint: It wasn’t Thomas Edison; he merely perfected the design. Skinner also said that the jukebox was not invented by the record industry. Lesson: Innovation per se isn’t the only thing that’s important, and positive changes can come from outside the area you’d normally think to look for them.

I presented a session on library-vendor negotiation, along with co-presenter Lesley Jackson, our EBSCO Account Manager. We presented nine different principles of negotiation, along with examples. There were things like “Be prepared,” “Don’t be afraid to ask,” and “Don’t take it personally.” We finished earlier than expected, but the audience participated and asked good questions. We had a number of vendor reps in the audience too, which made it more fun.

Another plenary session was a panel discussion about text and data mining. A fair amount of this was over my head, but one thing that was clear is that everybody’s still trying to figure it out. The vendor representative on the panel pointed out the difficulty vendors have with managing and licensing text mining because librarians can’t really articulate what “text mining” means. But it was also pointed out that (1) it means different things to different libraries and to different researchers; and (2) in many cases the researchers themselves don’t yet know where the research will take them, so it’s hard to know what permissions to ask for.