The Charleston Conference: 25th Anniversary Celebration of a Meeting Julia Gelfand and Anneliese Taylor 10 LIBRARY HI TECH NEWS Number 1 2006, pp. 10-12, # Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 0741-9058, DOI 10.1108/07419050610653904 Every first week in November the streets of the historic district in Charleston come alive with librarians who specialize in serials, acquisitions, collection development and recently digital preservation issues; and publishers and suppliers engaged in marketing, selling and licensing content to libraries. This year, the November 2-5 days attracted just shy of 1,000 participants, making it the largest conference ever at Charleston. It is also the longest run of a conference not sponsored by a society or trade association. The brainchild of Katrina Strauch, Collection Development Librarian at the College of Charleston, she launched it as an informal brainstorming of librarians with similar professional responsibilities but the cat got out of the hat and it has steadily grown for 25 years. A favorite meeting of most who attend, and for some the only professional meeting they make, it enjoys success because it rarely gets press coverage, and all parties are on a collegial equal footing. Now organized by a committee with Katina overseeing things it remains a ``down home'' with lots of time for schmoozing, meeting and enjoying the best of Charleston's low-country cuisine. The theme for this celebratory occasion was ``Things are seldom what they seem'' and nearly all speakers recapped how business is not what it used to be and libraries are very different today as staff learns to deal with a greater and growing remote population of users with all levels of technology experience. Katina sets the stage for the Charleston conference throughout the year with her publications, Against the Grain and the Charleston Advisor. The conference, with this one being no exception, is full of practical advice where explanations are made by publishers and suppliers, many librarians ask lots of questions and interactions are friendly and considerate. The information industry is known to send their new staff to the Charleston conference to learn how their customers think and do business with the trade. There was a Vendor Showcase for a half a day. Not to compete with the exhibition halls of the major associations' annual meetings this was just a hallway with lots of tables for people to greet one another, and see what is new. That is the focus, what is hot and new and coming down the pike. Vendors are expected to attend sessions at Charleston, not be the sole occupants of the stand or booth. Several pre- conferences on a range of topics including vendor negotiations, managing serials, eJournal update, statistics for librarians and the changing landscape of technical services units. There are several plenary sessions on different themes, concurrent sessions and trying to schedule 190 speakers in a building with far too few adequately sized meeting rooms is the major obstacle of this conference. Jerry Kline, president of Innovative Interfaces or III, one of the big OPAC companies talked about the changes underway in that marketplace. III has many projects underway including ERMS, federated searching, e-commerce software, linking to institutional repository content, refining link resolver technology, RSS feeds, DOIs, imaging projects among others. Concerns about the trend that 70 percent of users reportedly go to Google before checking a library's holdings or licensed databases is disturbing. He also suggested the mounting challenges of collection expansion that result in more cross library borrowing, resource info- sharing among consortia members, the uniqueness factor and the expanding universe of publishing. Tom Turvey from Google, probably anticipating pressure from a thousand librarians calmly shared how Google's goal is ``to create a comprehensive, searchable card catalog respecting copyright.'' There are three different ways to browse according to Turvey, and each contains advertising around the screen. First, a limited scope where a reader finds about 20 percent of the content; a library or public domain which unlocks restrictions for access; and a library with copyright restrictions where there is no scrolling and perhaps a couple of snippets of content. Readers can go to a library and borrow the book, or buy the book ± this just tells them what they need and is not meant to be a substitute. Mary Sauer-Games from ProQuest remained confident that ProQuest is headed in the right direction as Google is not a publisher and is not a librarian, but does great web searching. The publisher's role in a digital environment is to extend access to information and to respond to market needs and to add value to new and existing content and manage the intellectual content. Her example of the Parliamentary Papers, a big and expensive collection makes it more attractive as a teaching tool. Mark Sandler the Collection Development Officer at the University of Michigan responded to how the Google project is evolving there. Mark Kendall from Yankee Book Peddler offered five key challenges for booksellers in his session, ``Selling books in a world of technology.'' They are: (1) shift from content to technical operations and building an inter- face for e-ordering;