Charleston Conference

The Charleston Conference is an informal annual gathering of librarians, publishers, electronic resource managers, consultants, and vendors of library materials in Charleston, SC, in November, to discuss issues of importance to them all. It is designed to be a collegial gathering of individuals from different areas who discuss the same issues in a non-threatening, friendly, and highly informal environment. Presidents of companies discuss and debate with library directors, acquisitions librarians, reference librarians, serials librarians, collection development librarians, and many, many others.

We are a part of two different sessions this year at Charleston.

Letting the Data Lead the Way: Pathways of Discovery with Altmetrics

Friday November 6, 2015 2:25pm – 3:10pm
Grand Ballroom 1, Gaillard Center (95 Calhoun Street, Charleston, SC 29401)

The landscape around alternative metrics has been evolving rapidly. Going from a twitter hashtag in 2011 to a key component in research evaluation at many institutions, metrics that move beyond citation counts and journal impact factor are here to stay.

Metrics can now be harvested and applied to research around usage, captures, mentions, and social media, in addition to citations, giving a much more comprehensive and holistic view of impact. These new metrics are also much more timely than citation metrics and can keep pace with new formats much faster than the entrenched, legacy practices.

However, as institutions begin to utilize these more modern metrics, they often lead to surprising pathways of discovery and uses beyond what they had originally envisioned.

In this panel discussion, Ashley Lowery, Digital Collections Specialist at Georgia Southern University, John McDonald, Associate Dean of Collections for USC Libraries, and Andrea Michalek, President and Co-Founder of Plum Analytics, will discuss the trends in this space, examples of how altmetrics are used in practice, and the somewhat surprising outcomes that they have seen.

The attendees will have ample time to ask questions of the expert panel, and will leave with session with a better understanding of how their university could begin to take advantage of these new metrics, and some of the pitfalls to avoid.

Register

Shotgun Session: Data Visualization for Scholarly Communications

Friday November 6, 2015 3:30pm – 4:15pm
Calhoun Room, Francis Marion Hotel (387 King Street, Charleston, SC 29401)

In a world where the pace of scholarly communications and amount of data is rapidly increasing, using technology to make sense out of all of the data is paramount.
This shotgun session will cover:

– Categories of data that can be mined around scholarly output

– Data visualization approaches for representing the output of a university, grant, department, researcher, and each artifact produced

– Pros and cons of different data visualization approaches

– Real world examples of how these visualizations are being used

Register

Charleston Vendor Showcase

Wednesday November 4, 2015 10:30am – 6:00pm
Francis Marion Hotel (387 King Street, Charleston, SC 29401)

We’ll also be at the EBSCO table at the Charleston Vendor Showcase.  Stop by and say hello!