Richard Charkin makes his first trip to the Charleston Conference of scholarly librarians. He returns to London raving about it.

By Richard Charkin | @RCharkin

‘Ideas Were Promulgated’

I am not a great fan of conferences. I’ve attended too many and listened to too many self-serving speeches and long-winded question-and-answer sessions. But there’s always an exception. The Charleston Conference might not be as familiar or famous as Frankfurter Buchmesse, but it packs a real punch.

I traveled from the airport to my hotel, sharing the back row of a shuttle with a realtor from Santa Barbara—an “estate agent” in Brenglish—who asked what I was doing in Charleston. When I told him I was attending a conference of librarians he told me how boring that was going to be. He couldn’t have been more wrong. And in any event what’s so exciting about a conference of realtors?

There were some 2,000 attendees, the bulk of them North American with 363 from some 33 other countries and 495 speakers, 75 from outside the United States.

Statistics, however, don’t tell the whole story. Charleston is the preeminent gathering for librarians, information scientists, academic publishers, software vendors, and any organizations committed to the broadest dissemination of high-quality literature and data.

It’s impossible to do justice to the huge number of terrific sessions but this illustration might give you a flavor.

The meeting opened with a fireside chat between the ebullient and revered founder, Katina Strauch, and me with an audience of more than 900 in a concert hall, a genuinely scary experience. The session was chaired delicately by Richard Gallagher of the California-based academic publishing company Annual Reviews, the current owner of the conference.

One of the issues we addressed was the challenge for industry newcomers working from home to build an understanding of the total business, not just their own jobs and responsibilities. Specialization is fine but we also need to focus on the whole value chain.

Fostering that understanding was the purpose of the Macmillan Graduate Recruit program. It was therefore a pleasant surprise to meet four Macmillan alumni all of whom are thriving in different roles in the world of academic publishing. The strength of that approach is that it enables people to learn the whole business as opposed to its parts, and not by studying, but by doing a variety of jobs in early-career years.

The program was abandoned after I left Macmillan. I suppose it might have been perceived as too elitist, but I can’t help feeling that our industry needs more such efforts. Working from home is great for some people some of the time, but in-office mentoring and training still has a role to play. One of the architects of the Macmillan program was Nicky Byam Shaw, a Macmillan leader for several decades who oversaw a truly international, truly diverse market, subject matter, and work force. I was lucky enough to inherit much from Nicky—wisdom, support, and friendship.

Egos Were Left on the Tarmac

It’s hard and unfair to pick out a single presentation from the hundreds over the four days but the session titled “The Long Arm of the Law” with Roy Kaufman of CCC and Nancy Kopans of Ithaka exemplified the intellectual quality of the conference as a whole. The two speakers addressed from different points of view the challenges wrought by artificial (I prefer “augmented”) intelligence.

What seemed clear to me is that while publishers doing deals with LLMs for welcome new income streams is attractive, ultimately we’re going to need intermediaries such as the existing trusted agencies—CCC, CLA, CA, and so on—to develop efficient systems for collecting money, distributing it, ensuring compliance by the generative AI giants, and thus protecting copyright itself.

I’m quoted by one of the participants as saying, “Given the state of things, Charleston is absolutely vital.” While I cannot quite remember the context, I think it’s true. The speakers were of a consistently high standard. The sessions themselves were crisp and heterogeneous. Some lasted one hour, some only five minutes. The organization was impeccable, timekeeping on a par with a SpaceX mission to Mars.

Egos were left on the tarmac. Ideas were promulgated, picked up, argued for and against. And however strong any disagreements were, there was a totally appropriate degree of courtesy. Publishers met librarians without (too much) arguing about prices and other vendors were welcomed to the party. And outside the sessions the networking—an expression and concept I dislike—did what it’s meant to do, bring people together outside the formal schedule and allow new friendships to develop.

In short, Charleston is absolutely vital for anyone with an interest in the core elements of our joint business—helping readers find what they need to read authors finding the readers they need to reach. It’s an international venture, starting in Fiesole and now launching in Bangkok and who knows where next.

Charleston! Charleston! Made in Carolina!
Some dance, some prance, I’ll say there’s nothing finer than the
Charleston, Charleston, gee how you can shuffle;
Every step you do, leads to something new.
Man I’m telling you, it’s a lapazoo!

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Editor’s notes: The 2024 Charleston Conference’s digital edition begins today (December 9). The company gives us this page for information. Charleston Conference at Frankfurt, a half-day event, was again part of the Publishing Perspectives Forum programming in the 2024 edition of Frankfurter Buchmesse on October 18.

Join us monthly for Richard Charkin’s latest column. More coverage of his work from Publishing Perspectives is here. Richard Charkin’s opinions are his own, of course, and not necessarily reflective of those of Publishing Perspectives.