So at the close of the first day, what is that I think I heard? Between the actual presentations and the chat at the evening reception?

Well, I think the point made by Chris Meyer in the opening segment this morning is an important one. The shift from an industrial economy to an information economy is still very much in process and systems of all kinds have not yet adapted. We may not yet have determined where the value of digital scholarly content resides for users in an Information Economy. We're pretty sure that it needs to be reliable and authoritative and the pace of the workflow demands that, once vetted, it be efficiently disseminated.

But there are questions about how we establish the authority of the content. Do we do it through consensus (as in something like Wikipedia) or do we do trust experts and professionals to produce authoritative content (knowing that there have been instances where that trust has been abused as when news reporters don't do the necessary depth of research necessary to properly cover a topic or dig out the facts). That wasn't necessarily articulated in the newspaper panel, but I think it is the gist of the concern.

In the afternoon, the question (again not necessarily articulated) was "how do we package content appropriately for delivery and use and still derive profit from that activity?". Jenny Walker was talking about the transformation of reference works from massive print tomes on shelves into databases that are licensed by institutions and used by students and researchers. It isn't an area of scholarly publishing that will continue to be profitable on the basis of the old business model when the publishers' business was to deliver a physical artifact. The Credo Reference business model is similar to other online aggregator services. The business model is licensed access.

That licensed access is the same model being used in Pearson's textbook as outlined by Tobin. The deliverable is *not* a printed volume; it's the printed volume in conjunction with an online learning system. What the student pays for is the "engaged learning" environment. Again, the clear movement is toward the software licensing model. The speaker claimed that this was entirely satisfactory for the institutions and departments using the system. He claimed it was a more effective teaching tool for imparting knowledge. Indeed, he seemed to suggest that the only dissatisfied customers were students trying to "game the system" and escape without paying for any textbook. He was more open about the need to combat the mindset of "free information".

The contribution of Emlyn Koster of the Liberty Science Center was the idea that preservation, curation, and display of artifacts or collections may not be the most effective mechanism for communicating information and learning. Modern society appears to want more immersive and interactive experiences as being more conducive to natural (or painless) learning. The information is absorbed rather than mastered. Can such a model from the museum community be applicable to scholarly content?

The final discussion was perhaps aimed at determining whether the multiple offerings of magazines, events, data, online experiences and rich media of B2B publishers represented another strategy that might be employed by scholarly content providers. That is, might these publishers position themselves as the ultimate source of information about a specific niche, discipline or research activity in the same way that a business publisher might and essentially sell access to that wide variety of information delivery options?

I think the meeting organizers' actual intent was to spread a banquet of ideas before the attendees with the hope that the individual publishers would benefit by picking and choosing from a wide range of approaches in creating appropriately customized information tools suited to their particular community. Did the attendees actually get that experience?