12th Annual NISO-BISG The Changing Standards Landscape Forum

12:00 Noon – 12:15pm – Welcome

Todd Carpenter, Executive Director, NISO and Julie Blattberg, Strategic Advisor, BISG

12:15 – 12:45pm – What Does the User Need in an E-Book? What Does the User Want?

Speaker: Eric Swenson, President, Swensonia Consulting

Eric Swenson is president of Swensonia Consulting, an interdisciplinary product management and open source research intelligence group.  Eric has worked at the forefront of digital media, electronic publishing and information services for more than 25 years. He began his career in 1992 as the co-founder of the radical art group and publisher Necro Enema Amalgamated. Despite (or perhaps because of) his work in experimental art, design and independent publishing, he has managed a successful career in both consumer and scholarly media, most recently, leading Elsevier’s premier abstracting and indexing platform, Scopus. He also had the honor of serving as a board member and past-president of NFAIS.  

12:45pm – 1:15pm – Assessing Usage: Reading, Research and Reference

Speaker: Hugh McGuire, Executive Director, Rebus Foundation

Hugh McGuire is Executive Director of the Rebus Foundation, a non-profit that is building the infrastructure to support books on the open web, by: building a new collaborative model for creating and publishing Open Educational Resources (OER), and building an open platform for scholarly reading. He has been building tools and communities to bring books onto the open web since about 2005. He is the founder of LibriVox.org (free public domain audiobooks, made by volunteers from around the world) and Pressbooks (an open source book publishing platform built on WordPress).

1:15 – 2:00pm – Ensuring Accessibility of Ebooks

Speaker: Rachel Comerford, Senior Director of Content Standards and Accessibility, Macmillan Learning

Rachel Comerford has more than a decade of experience in the publishing industry having worked in sales, content creation and development, and production. In her current role as the Senior Director of Content Standards and Accessibility at Macmillan Learning, Rachel is responsible for establishing end to end workflows for creating accessible ebooks, web content, and web platforms for all users. She and her team work closely with customers to gain a better understanding of their accessibility needs and then communicate those needs across departments within Macmillan.

Speaker: Kara Kroes-Li, Director of Product Management, Ebooks, EBSCO

Kara Kroes Li has been building e-book products and services since 2005. As the Director of Product Management for EBSCO, she is responsible for understanding the needs of end-users, librarian customers, and publisher partners and distilling those needs into a product strategy. She has attended accessibility training at WebAIM and over the last few years helped drive an accessibility and universal design mindset within the EBSCO Books program. Her current projects and interests include UX development, user research, collection development workflows, and analytics.

2:00 – 2:15pm - Break

2:15 – 3:00pm – Ensuring System Interoperability

Speaker: Mitch Davis, Founder and Chief Business Officer, BiblioLabs

Mitchell Davis is a publishing and media entrepreneur. He was the founder in 2000 of BookSurge the world’s first integrated global print-on-demand and publishing services company (sold to Amazon.com in 2005 and re-branded as CreateSpace). Since 2008 he has been founder & chief business officer of BiblioLabs -- the creators of BiblioBoard.

BiblioBoard is an award-winning App and web application that makes community engagement tools and simultaneous use content available to public, school and academic libraries. Today they work with thousands of libraries and publishers around the world in pursuit of a new vision for the future of libraries.

Speaker: Peter Murray, Open Source Community Advocate, Index Data

Peter Murray is the Open Source Community Advocate at Index Data, a software development and consulting enterprise with expertise in networked information retrieval and management based on open standards. He received an MLIS from Simmons College and a Bachelor of Science degree in Systems Analysis from Miami University. Peter’s current activities include building relationships among libraries, organizations, and service providers participating in the FOLIO open source library service platform project. His other interests include promoting awareness and integration of privacy-supporting tools into library services, the application of JPEG 2000 for long-term access and preservation of still and moving image content, distributed identity management systems, and—with the moniker “The Disruptive Library Technology Jester”—the rapid advancement of library services in a social web world.

3:00 – 3:30pm – BISG Ebooks White Paper

Speaker: Kevin S. Hawkins, Assistant Dean for Scholarly Communication, University of North Texas

Kevin S. Hawkins is assistant dean for scholarly communication for the University of North Texas Libraries, where he founded the library publishing program and directs services to help researchers understand and adapt to changes in how researchers communicate with one another. Learn more at http://www.ultraslavonic.info/ .

3:30 – 4:00pm – Moderated Roundtable Discussion

Moderator: Todd Carpenter, Executive Director, NISO

4:00pm Adjournment