Mile High Views: Surveying the Serials Vista: NASIG 2006: Proceedings of the North American Serials Interest Group Inc 21^st Annual Conference May 4‐7, 2006, Denver, Colorado

Citation

Grosz, P. (2008), "Mile High Views: Surveying the Serials Vista: NASIG 2006: Proceedings of the North American Serials Interest Group Inc 21^st Annual Conference May 4‐7, 2006, Denver, Colorado", Library Management, Vol. 29 No. 6/7, pp. 634-634. https://doi.org/10.1108/01435120810894671

In the rapidly changing world of serials, the annual NASIG conference always presents a wide range of topics and perspectives. This collection of 35 papers from the twenty‐first NASIG conference held in Denver, Colorado includes papers from the pre‐conference, vision, strategy and tactic sessions and provides a brief overview of the poster sessions. In the wide range of topics covered, the papers cover serials issues from the perspectives of the users, librarians, serials vendors and publishers and the changes / challenges being faced by these various groups.

The four pre‐conference workshops covered the areas of serials cataloguing; mapping licence language for electronic resource management, and how to implement an institutional repository.

The three vision sessions, were presented by Robin Sloan, Brenda Bailey‐Hainer and T. Scott Plutchak. Robin Sloan looked at the changes in media as it becomes more digitised and disaggregated and what does this mean for libraries and scholarly communication; Brenda Bailey‐Hainer gave a presentation outlining the project and outcomes of the digitisation of Colorado's historic newspaper collection; and T. Scott Plutchak looked at the changes to and impacts on scholarly communication systems as we transition from a print system to a digital one.

The strategy and tactic sessions covered a broad range of topics including serial users needs in the electronic environments and how to identify them; the changing landscape of serials, especially with the increase in open access journals; the transition from print to electronic journals; the challenges being faced by medium and small publishers in the electronic world; journal pricing for both the traditional print and electronic formats and how a serials agent handles this pricing; functional requirements for bibliographic records, and resource description and access; and how libraries have adapted to changes bought on by the increasing number of electronic resources, including workflow and collection changes, reorganisation of technical services areas and training needs of staff. There are also a number of papers dealing with technical access issues including electronic resource management systems and their future, open URLs, and accessing and linking to ensure that online resources are easily found.

The breadth of topics included in these papers ensures that there is information for anyone involved in serials, and the proceedings continue to provide a useful reference to the ever‐changing world of serials.