9-8-23
Jimmy Buffett has gone to the great recording studio in the sky. A man who personified carpe diem yet made a billion dollars … well, it does give one pause for thought.
The Lowcountry has a wonderful coast of marshes and beaches, rivers and creeks. Our Margaritaville is the incorporated town of Folly Beach, about 45-minutes from Charleston depending on traffic. Among other picturesque features of the town is a lawyer’s office with a shark’s head mounted above the front door.
Doubtless, the bars were packed over Labor Day weekend with boozy mourners singing off-key along with “Cheeseburger in Paradise.”
Closer to our topics, Buffett wrote a seldom heard song called “Love in the Library.” It’s about encountering love in libraries of old – newspaper racks, worn marble floors, scholarly unknown woman (1994). Here’s the refrain:
“Love in the library, quiet and cool
Love in the library, there are no rules
Surrounded by stories, surreal and sublime
I fell in love in the library once upon a time.”
The Key West library certainly seems a fine place. It dates to the mid-nineteenth century, and in the 20th the other Keys were served by a bookmobile. The current locale opened in 1959. They have Tennessee Williams’ library card and overdue book notices. Hemingway left a trove of documents in Sloppy Joe’s bar including a galley copy of To Have and to Have Not which is his Key West story. These are now in Special Collections.
In WWI, Hemingway was an ambulance driver on the Italian Front. He was wounded and while convalescing, fell in love with his nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky. She thought he was a foolish boy; he immortalized her in A Farewell to Arms.
And in an astounding bit of synchronicity, Agnes married another man, and they moved to Key West. She worked for a time in the library. There is no record of her and Ernest meeting. There is a loving letter from Buffett telling them he used the library as his office when he was getting started. And if they ever needed help “keeping the AC going,” to let him know. So in the hearts of his fans, Buffett never really dies. Because as he sang:
“It’s the magic of the music
That still draws a crowd.”
From your (Rizz) editors: Who says we aren’t with it and against the grain? Rizz is “new teen slang” that supposedly describes a mix of “confidence, charm, magnetism and je ne sais quoi.”(article in the Wall Street Journal 8-31-23). I looked it up in Webster’s Dictionary yesterday, and it said no such word, but, lo and behold, today, there is a definition “slang term for courtship/seduction skills”! Imagine that!
The Charleston Conference 2023 is excited to announce our outstanding line up of keynote and plenary sessions! The full agenda will be coming soon.
Opening Keynote: Wednesday, November 8, 9:00 am
Executive Panel: Large Publishing Organizations
Moderated by Roger Schonfeld, Vice President, Organizational Strategy / ITHAKA; Libraries, Scholarly Communication, and Museums / Ithaka S+R
Panelists:
* Frank Vrancken Peeters, CEO, Springer Nature
* Bar Veinstein, President, Academia & Government, Clarivate
* Judy Verses, President, Academic and Government, Elsevier
The largest publishing organizations in the research sector grapple with some vital issues because of their scale, helping to drive the agenda for others while also being targeted for influence and advocacy on several important issues. In this plenary panel, we bring together executive leaders from some of these largest publishing organizations to discuss a few of the biggest issues facing scholarship and scholarly communication in the decade ahead. We expect to cover topics like trust in science and research integrity; what it means to be a global business in this sector today; and the future of the scholarly record.
Thursday, November 9, 9:00 am
James DaUnt, CEO, Barnes & Noble
James Daunt is Chief Executive Officer of Barnes & Noble, the world’s largest retail bookseller, of stationery and gift retailer Paper Source and of Waterstones, the largest retail bookseller in the United Kingdom. Mr. Daunt currently oversees approximately 600 Barnes & Noble bookstores and 125 Paper Source in the United States and over 300 bookshops across the United Kingdom, Ireland, The Netherlands and Belgium, which include Waterstones, Blackwell’s, Foyles and Hatchards. Mr. Daunt has over 30 years of experience in bookselling. In 1990, after an early career as an investment banker, Mr. Daunt opened his own bookstore in London, called (unimaginatively) Daunt Books. Daunt Books now has nine locations, mainly in London, and remains independently owned by Mr. Daunt.
Friday, November 10, 9:00 am
The Long Arm of the Law
Moderated by Ann Okerson, Director, Offline Internet Consortium
Panelists:
* Kyle K. Courtney, Copyright Advisor, Harvard University
* Michelle Wu, Georgetown University Law Center
The massive revolution in artificial intelligence has allowed users to produce text, imagery, and other content based solely on natural language prompts. Inevitably, copyright issues are raised on two sides of the AI question – the AI’s input and AI’s output. The input question has legal implications that are complex, newly evolving, and it has resulted in litigation, dealing with the methods by which AI systems are “trained” to create literary, visual, and other artistic works: by exposing the program to large amounts of data, which may consist of existing works such as text and images gathered from various sources. In particular, for the Charleston audience, there are questions about the implications of training AI for our cultural institutions, many of which have a mission to share their collections to support research, aid in the dissemination of knowledge, and promote innovation. Join this wide-ranging conversation on AI, copyright, transformative fair use, and particularly the role of libraries in this new and exciting space.
Date/Time TBD: Virtual Week Keynote
Martin Paul Eve, Principal R&D developer at Crossref and the Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at the University of London’s Birkbeck College
“Contains scenes of mild peril”: the state of digital preservation across seven million articles
Digital preservation underpins the persistence of scholarly links and citations through the DOI system. But we do not currently know, at scale, the extent to which articles assigned a DOI are adequately preserved. In this talk, I describe our efforts to construct a database of preservation information from original archival sources and then to examine the preservation statuses of 7,438,037 DOIs in a random sample. Our work reveals an alarming preservation deficit. Only 0.96% of Crossref members (n=204) can be confirmed to digitally preserve over 75% of their content in 3 or more of the archives that we studied. A slightly larger proportion – 8.5% (n=1,797) – preserved over 50% of their content in 2 or more archives. Many members – 57.7% (n=12,257) – though, only met the threshold of having 25% of their material in a single archive. Most worryingly, 32.9% (n=6,982) of Crossref members seem not to have any adequate digital preservation in place, against the recommendations of the Digital Preservation Coalition. In light of these findings, I suggest a number of currently lacking infrastructural mechanisms that we need to improve the state of digital preservation. If we want the digital scholarly record to persist beyond the twenty-first century, we are still quite some way from guaranteeing this.
List of Preconferences and Seminars
All Registration Rates and Details
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