ER&L 2015

I really enjoyed Adam's post on ARLIS 2015. It sounds like he had a great time and got a lot out of his conference experience.  I recommend to everyone to try to get to a library conference if you can, and I also totally recommend the smaller, more narrowly focused conferences.  If you're a first-timer, the smaller events are much less overwhelming, you'll have a better chance to meet people in your chosen field, and like Adam, you'll probably find that a majority of the presentations are directly relevant to your interests.

I also thank Adam for reminding me that I could blog about my experience at ER&L 2015. I won a travel grant from Taylor & Francis that paid my way to Austin for this great conference on Electronic Resources and Libraries. The conference had a nice mix of programming, with a lot aimed at new electronic resources managers, as well as a healthy number of presentations on more advanced topics. Discovery was a hot topic, with several presentations and two different panels, one comparing experiences with different systems, and another analyzing products to see if they favored one publisher's or platform's content over another's (happily, they didn't find evidence of favoritism). Lots of presenters mentioned metadata in a variety of contexts--usage data (improving standards, collection assessment), journal metadata (TRANSFER and PIE-J and "publishers, whatever you do, please stop with the retroactive title changes"), user data and privacy (analyzing data, new NISO initiative), discovery (which system delivers the best relevancy ranking for results?), altmetrics (measuring the impact of scholarship), and interoperability (what were the challenges of migration to this next generation system?). Of course I couldn't get to everything I wanted to hear, but I had a blast trying and would recommend ER&L to anyone starting or considering a career in electronic resources management, collection assessment, or a related job.