The ALPSP 2015 conference began with a compelling and discussion provoking keynote by Anurag Acharya, Co-creator of Google Scholar. His keynote titled "What happens when your library is worldwide and all articles are easy to find?" covered the changes in scholarly communication and how user behaviour has evolved in response to this, what do users search for, what do they want and what do they cite?
Key takeaways from his session were that abstracts were used more than ever in the search process and as the researcher demands more answers abstracts that are written for a broader audience will improve access across other disciplines. Research is inherently a process of filtering and abstracts are a crucial part of the filtering process. Forcing full text on early-stage users is not useful and limiting COUNTER stats to full text misses much of an article's utility to researchers, Acharya noted. He concluded by stating that we are lucky to live in an era of information plenty. Better a glut than a famine.
How do you improve discovery and access to improve researchers, academics and students better? Roger C Schonfeld, Director of the Library and Scholarly Communications Program at Ithaka S+R, chaired a panel including publisher, librarian and a library supplier later during the day. Lettie Conrad, Executive Manager for Online Products at SAGE talked about their research on discoverability and delivery and learning from users to support their work. Conrad observed that whether we like it or not, the majority of search starts with the mainstream web. As a researcher advances in study skills and moves along their academic careers, they start to shift to speciality databases. Library discovery is for known items.
Deirdre Costello, Senior UX Researcher at EBSCO talked about how user expectations are formed on the open web, what users look for to make decisions about library resources, and why we need to think about our search results as one of the most important user experiences we can craft.
At the end of the 1st day, each of the 9 shortlisted finalists for the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing presented for four minutes each to profile their submission in an intense lightning session before the Awards dinner.
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