Last week, I got to go to my first New York Library Association conference, and it was a blast. As I mentioned previously, Amy Buckland and I gave our workshop on digital repository strategies and practice. It’s a workshop I love, because no matter how many times we’ve given it it’s never the same: Amy and I always have new experiences to relate, and the groups we work with are always so different that their questions and insights are new and revelatory each time.
Items of note this go-round: it was the first time that just about everyone in the room seemed to have adequate or nigh-adequate staffing for their repository projects — hallelujah! — and the folks running Digital Commons @Brockport are doing some amazing things.
I also had the honor of sitting on a panel with Amy and Jenica Rogers, talking about Open Access in scholarly publishing. We went with a simple format: we put what we hoped would be a provocative statement up on a slide, and then got a discussion going with the audience about it. There were six statements in total, and if you read Jenica’s blog*, you’ve likely seen them already. I’ll reproduce them here because they got great discussion at NYLA, and great discussion on her blog, and I’m curious to see if we can pull off a great discussion trifecta. Or hat-trick. Or similar sports metaphor for something happening three times. In any case, here they are:
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A child born today will use nothing but open access materials for research in college.
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Textbook companies will go out of business as faculty realize they can write, compile, and publish their own customized open course texts.
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Future discussions of the quality of library collections will focus not on the collections a library owns, but on the collections a library creates.
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The adoption of open access collections will obviate proprietary discovery layers.
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It is irresponsible for federally-funded researchers not to make their work available in an open format.
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True change in the scholarly publishing system will come from smaller liberal arts colleges, and not the big guys.
Oh, and Amy provided what’s probably the best opening slide ever.
So, discuss in the comments if you have a mind to, or head over to Jenica’s and jump in the discussion there. In any case, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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* And if you don’t, why the hell not?
The Nascent Librarian 
