JISC, ALPSP, Crossref, and The Publishers' Association sponsored a conference - Discovery and access - standards and the information chain - in December. The proceedings are now available, as is a summary.

This is really an excellent set of presentations from knowledgeable presenters, and they all repay reading.

I was interested to see 'disclosure' used as a category by several folks: it is increasingly of general interest. I was also interested to see the phrase 'evidence-based librarianship' used in the context of Sushi and Counter. Issues of metadata and identifiers were identified as crucial, across the range of resources that we need to manage (institutions, people, and collections, for example, as well as information objects).

Here are some things that especially caught my eye, although, again, all the presentations are interesting.

• Mark Bide has a useful introduction looking at flows of data between libraries and publishers
• Hugh Look has a nice slide showing the overwhelming acronymic density of our current environment.
• Robert Bley of Ex Libris has an interesting discussion about ERM and its relationship to other parts of the library systems environment.
• Frances Shipsey talks about versioning issues with eprints and journal articles.
• James Culling talks about issues of managing knowledge bases.