Serials in the Park: Proceedings of the North American Serials Interest Group, Inc. 18th Annual Conference, June 26‐29, 2003, Portland State University, Portland, Oregon

Citation

Mugridge, R.L. (2007), "Serials in the Park: Proceedings of the North American Serials Interest Group, Inc. 18th Annual Conference, June 26‐29, 2003, Portland State University, Portland, Oregon", Collection Building, Vol. 26 No. 2, pp. 66-66. https://doi.org/10.1108/01604950710742149

This compilation of papers from the 2003 North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) Annual Conference deals with many issues of current interest to serialists. Serials in the Park is organized into four sections that reflect the structure of the conference itself, including pre‐conference programs, plenary sessions, concurrent sessions and workshops. This book would be useful not only to those who could not attend the conference, but also to those who had, as they would be able to read the reports of many informative sessions that they would not have attended. In most cases the papers in the volume are reports written by observers, not the presenters themselves.

The first section includes reports of two pre‐conference programs. The first pre‐conference was presented by five librarians from Portland State University and discussed the development of a model to allocate funding for library materials. The second pre‐conference provided an introduction to the cataloging of serial publications and discussed recent cataloging rule changes. Although the two pre‐conferences were likely to be at least half‐day events, the corresponding papers in the proceedings were not proportionally lengthier than any of the other plenary or concurrent papers. The proceedings would have benefited from a more thorough reporting of the two pre‐conferences.

Of the three plenary session reports in the second section, the strongest is the third, a presentation by Jill Emery and others representing academic libraries, a publisher, and an integrated library system (ILS) vendor. The presenters discussed the serials landscape, serials management, a serials publisher's perspective, change management theory (quantum management) and the role of ILS vendors in serials management. These are useful topics for serialists and provide a thoughtful introduction to the rest of the papers. The weakest of the plenary session reports is the report on the Town Hall Meeting. The topics discussed included conference housing (hotels versus dormitories), timing of future conferences, hiring paid staff to support NASIG administration and other similar topics. This report could have been left out of the conference proceedings without any loss to its value.

The concurrent sessions and workshops were more numerous and covered the whole range of serials management issues such as digital preservation, electronic journals usage patterns, the collection of usage statistics, aggregation issues and electronic journal management challenges. In addition to topics strictly about serials management, some of the workshops dealt with issues of general interest such as networking skills, copyright law, mentoring new serialists, developing procedures manuals and training.

Overall, this well‐edited compilation of reports and papers is an excellent cross‐section of the current issues and concerns relating to serials acquisition, cataloging and management. It would be an excellent addition to library collections that do not already subscribe to The Serials Librarian.