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NASIG 2015 - Day 3

The conference overload was starting to happen on Friday, but I soldiered on.

At breakfast I talked to someone from a regional library council. Her background is in special libraries, but in her current position she works with a ton of teeny tiny public libraries, so I was excited to find someone with some common ground.

As for the opening speaker, I was pleasantly surprised. The head honcho at Alexander Street Press talked about the future of open access publishing and the reception was mixed. First, he was surprised that librarians didn't think all scholarly publishing was going to be open access in the next decade. Then when he described how publishers were going to stay in business, basically by providing services that either make it easier for researchers to publish or to find what they're looking for in bare bones open access text, the crowd seemed ready to revolt and scream that that wasn't really open access. Maybe because I'm not in academia I'm not so up in arms about this, but I couldn't really understand what all the fuss was about. What he was saying made a lot of sense.

My concurrent morning session was about USUS a really helpful website for understanding and reporting issues with COUNTER reports. As expected, it was really hard not to get bogged down in the details, but I do feel more confident about using the site now.

For lunch we had a small vendor fair with snacks scattered around. Unfortunately the only two vendors there that were really relevant to me were a vendor I really don't like much (so didn't want to talk to them) and a vendor who has the best salesperson ever, but she did not come to this conference, so I wasn't that interested in talking to them, either. I of course nabbed some swag, though.

My first afternoon session was about free tools available to manage the electronic resources life cycle. I yet again feel guilty for not really understanding Access, but I wrote down the name of some other resources they listed and I think I may give Trello a try.

The second session kind of confused me. I thought it was supposed to be about the crazy amount of unwritten duties that go into being an electronic resources librarian, but it sounded like your typical "Here's how we done good" presentation. Maybe it was helpful for others, but the projects they talked about had nothing that I could apply to my library.

Saturday was a day where I really wasn't  interested in any of the conference offerings, so I didn't partake. But I'm still sticking around because I signed up for a post conference workshop on Sunday.

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