NASIG 2007 conference: opening session

I'm attending the North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) meeting this week in Louisville, KY. In addition to fulfilling a number of organizational duties (committee work, etc.), I'll be attending a number of workshops and presentation which I'll be reporting on here.

This morning the first session waa an all-conference session at which which Bob Stein spoke about "The Evolution of Reading and Writing in the Networked Era". He has some very interesting (and controversial I think, at least among librarians) ideas. His main point was that what have existed as marginal notes in paper books for hundreds of years are actually converstations between the author and the reader (as well as between readers) that are very much like comments on a blog or the open peer review that some pre-publications go through.