NASIG 2025

Join the NASIG Board for closing remarks on the final day of conference. Learn more about being involved in NASIG. Hear initial details for the 2026 NASIG Annual Conference planned for Madison, Wisconsin.

At a time when academic departments are often pressured to compete for limited funding and status in
both the public and institutional eye, one thing every discipline has in common is metadata. At the same
time, it is through the often underexamined (by non-librarians) information infrastructures within
academia that inequities are perpetuated: troublesome subject headings and taxonomic practices,
exorbitant vendor pricing and dubious data privacy practices, the ongoing insinuation and
commoditization of generative AI, and so on.

Library workers are uniquely positioned to call out the political aspects of information
infrastructures—and many of us try to do so but are limited by time constraints and competing priorities
in information literacy one-shots, for example. Drawing from Nicole Starosielski’s work on
communications and media infrastructures as well as Sofia Leung and Jorge López-McKnight’s Knowledge
Justice and providing examples from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, this talk
would illuminate how collaborations across public services, technical services, and departmental faculty
can promote a deeper understanding of the component pieces of research and scholarship and of how
to combat the biases that structure them.

The presentation will cover various steps in the development of an accessibility review process:

Identifying institutional accessibility guidelines
Assign staff and establish a regular review schedule
Determine the platforms that will be included
Select appropriate methods for scanning and reviewing accessibility
Establish a process for reporting results
Identifying and working with stakeholders for each platform
Sharing reports with relevant parties
Providing options for addressing common accessibility issues
How to Organize or store annual reports effectively

Learning Outcomes

1. Attendees will understand the importance of accessibility.
2. Attendees will recognize the importance of working with institutional accessibility standards.
3. Attendees will identify accessibility checkers available at their own institutions.
4. Attendees will apply the steps to identify resources that may need an accessibility review.
5. Attendees will be able to develop their own accessibility review process.

The increase in acquisitions of electronic resources is placing more demand than ever on technical services workers. The work is becoming more technical, more complex, and is constantly changing. Electronic resources, acquisitions, and cataloging work have all become interconnected as well, leading to additional challenges of change management in the workplace. Technical services workers are experiencing low-morale and burnout. The presentation will discuss challenges leading to burnout for Technical Services workers. Literature regarding burnout and low morale experiences will be presented. There will also be a discussion of potential solutions to burnout, such as slow librarianship and peer mentoring. The creation of a peer mentoring program for NASIG will be discussed at the conclusion of the presentation. Attendees are welcome to share experiences and offer feedback.

Learning Outcomes

1. Attendees will learn about existing literature regarding burnout in libraries and proposed solutions of slow librarianship and peer mentoring. 
2. Attendees will have time to share their own experiences and will be asked to provide feedback regarding a peer mentoring program.
   

As Open Access (OA) is gaining momentum, institutions are engaging in partnerships to help further advancements in open publishing. Publishers are embracing Transformative Agreements, Read and Publish deals, and Subscribe to Open (S2O) models. With this new landscape comes the challenge of quantifying the impact and value on investments for both institutions and publishers alike. Metrics such as COUNTER statistics are a powerful tool for assessing the reach, engagement, and scholarly impact of OA initiatives within collaborative institutional-publisher frameworks.
This session seeks to provide a comprehensive understanding of how statistics can be strategically employed to measure and communicate the value of OA in partnerships with both traditional publishers and emerging open models. Hear from stakeholders across the industry (two librarians, one small publisher, and one large publisher) for different perspectives on the proliferation of OA and how statistics can help tell a story.

Learning Outcomes
Attendees will gain a deep understanding of how metrics like COUNTER can be harnessed to measure and communicate the impact and value of OA in institutional collaborations, fostering informed decision-making and strategic planning in the dynamic landscape of scholarly communication.

Starting a new unit or carving out a distinct department within an academic library presents both opportunities and challenges. Drawing on my experiences at Kansas State University and the University of Arkansas, this session examines how to strategically build and evolve teams responsible for managing electronic resources, acquisitions, and licensing. Through real-world examples—such as developing bespoke training documentation, implementing large-scale cross-departmental projects like fund restructuring, and cultivating cohesive, supportive teams while managing scope creep—attendees will see how I have implemented a new vision for electronic resource best practices at two large R1 academic institutions while onboarding as a new tenure-track faculty member.

Participants will learn how to conduct gap analyses, advocate for and adopt project management tools like JIRA and Confluence, and meet their staff at their current skill levels through targeted training materials. The presentation will highlight early successes and tangible outcomes, including streamlined workflows, improved transparency around acquisitions, and demonstrable staff skill growth. Additionally, it will address the interpersonal challenges inherent in organizational change, offering strategies for communicating a shared vision, building trust, and motivating teams through periods of uncertainty.

By emphasizing scalable solutions, this session ensures that libraries of all sizes can apply these approaches. Attendees will leave with a clearer blueprint for reshaping their departments—equipped with actionable frameworks, leadership techniques, and practical tools that can be put into practice immediately. These insights not only align with NASIG Core Competencies and professional standards but also meet the evolving strategic demands of academic libraries in a rapidly changing landscape.

Learning Outcomes

1. Identify and apply strategies to establish and evolve library units or departments by conducting gap analyses, advocating for growth, and creating adaptable frameworks that set a clear strategic direction and foster organizational cohesion.
2. Develop and implement training programs and advocate for ongoing professional development to address staff skill gaps, enhance team rapport, and align individual competencies with a unified, forward-looking vision—scalable to various library sizes and resource levels.
3. Transition from routine, day-to-day tasks to a more structured and strategic vision of electronic resource stewardship by adopting project-based workflows and tools like JIRA and Confluence. This approach fosters streamlined processes, improved transparency, and an enhanced ability to respond effectively to evolving challenges.

Librarians, especially in technical services and collection development, regularly work with data to perform a variety of analyses. Often, these activities are project based or performed annually, which makes it difficult to repeat previous analyses. Further, data points can change over time due to system migrations and changes to standards, such as moving from COUNTER 4 to COUNTER 5. Overall, this can leave librarians unsatisfied with current data practices even though they are essential in making decisions in collection development and other areas.

Enterprise data strategy provides a framework for thinking about an organization's data and how to make it trustworthy, actionable, and secure. It provides details to concepts such as data governance and security; best practices to technical aspects like data storage, processing, and analysis; and clarification to data team member roles and skills required.
This presentation will introduce these enterprise data concepts, and present examples of how it can be used in an academic library. The case study is our library's project to implement an enterprise data environment using the Microsoft Fabric platform, of which Microsoft Power BI is a component. By linking the broader concepts to a case study, the presentation will show one of many ways to implement an enterprise data environment in an academic library setting, allowing attendees to imagine how they might approach such a solution depending on the tools and professional skills in their library.
While implementing an enterprise data environment requires a significant investment of time and resources, it allows for more trustworthy and secure data that is more engaging to library stakeholders, such as liaisons and administrators, both inside and outside of the library.

Further, by thinking of library data as enterprise data, librarians can ingest data from any library source system (such as a room reservation system, or reference tracking system), allowing for a robust and comprehensive view of the library's collections and services down the road. Finally, librarians in technical services and collection development are uniquely equipped with the technical skills and systems thinking required to undertake and maintain such a project.

Learning Outcomes
Attendees will leave the presentation with familiarity with enterprise data concepts and some ideas of how they can apply those concepts in their library. They will be able to identify their current data practices and tie them to enterprise data tools and concepts.

As the momentum around open access continues (OA), university libraries play an important role in promoting and supporting OA and advancing research that is inclusive and accessible. The Emory Libraries’ Open Access Dashboard (OAB) aims to create a data visualization tool that showcases both the Libraries' financial investment in open access and overall Emory researcher OA activity. In other words, where are researchers publishing OA, what are the funding sources for OA, how much is the university paying for OA, and how are the Emory Libraries facilitating OA publication? This presentation will demonstrate the importance of tracking and showcasing OA investments, enabling institutional libraries to make informed decisions about their OA strategies and promote their commitment to OA. It will serve as a model for other university libraries as they seek to do the same, promoting transparency and collaboration within the OA library community.

In discussing the design and establishment of the dashboard, we will highlight the choices and decisions made surrounding data collection and data elements along with the challenges of melding together multiple sources of data, including bibliometric data, article processing charges data (APCs), and internal and external funding sources. We will further discuss the strengths and limitations of the data and why we chose different data views in Tableau.

Learning Outcomes

1. Attendees will gain insight on how to track and visualize OA publishing at their local institution and how such visualization can enable the library to highlight their contribution and commitment to OA. 
2. Attendees will gain an appreciation for the data challenges that modeling and visualizing OA activities can present to libraries.
3. Attendees will see how the OA dashboard data can be used in decision-making and advocacy for OA article funding investments.

The Snapshot Sessions will consist of five-minute presentations with a focus on an idea, project, workflow, etc.

[Session Title] - Rebecca Bealer

[Session Title] - Jessie Copeland

Empowering E-Resource Decisions: How Our Custom-Built Tool Streamlined Renewal Tracking- Wenli Gao, Kerry Creelman, Keith Komos

E-Resource Incidents Tracking: Seeking Patterns While Demonstrating Workload - Clare Keating

End of an Era: Lessons Learned from a Decade of Demand Driven Acquisitions - Jessica Rigg, James Mayes

This session will explore how team collaboration, cross-functional teamwork, user-centered communication, and creative problem-solving empower libraries to address complex eResource access challenges. Drawing on case studies from a medical library, participants will learn strategies to enhance team expertise, reduce service disruptions, and improve user satisfaction.

Effective collaboration among library staff, IT professionals, and vendors is crucial for resolving access issues efficiently. By fostering open communication and breaking down departmental silos, teams can work together to identify innovative solutions and implement them effectively. Case studies will highlight successful team efforts in overcoming these challenges.

Building a culture of collaboration and open-mindedness enables teams to approach problems from multiple perspectives, leading to more creative and effective solutions. Participants will discover best practices for maintaining clear communication with users during disruptions, emphasizing transparency, proactive engagement, and open dialogue.
The session will also focus on innovative solutions that teams can implement to ensure continuous access while restoring services, such as direct access link options. Additionally, participants will learn how to build comprehensive testing plans that enable teams to quickly diagnose and identify issues, streamlining the troubleshooting process.
Training staff on new technologies and creating adaptable workflows is essential for maintaining a flexible and efficient service delivery model. By embracing a a culture of continuous learning and innovation, teams can adapt to changing technologies and user needs.

Finally, participants will learn actionable solutions for minimizing service disruptions through teamwork, including protocols for rapid response to access issues and tools that facilitate collaboration. Innovative approaches to integrating user feedback into service improvements will also be explored, ensuring that user needs are at the forefront of decision-making.

Learning Outcomes

1. Recognize the central role of teams in managing eResource access challenges.
2. Learn effective strategies for fostering a culture of collaboration within library settings.
3. Gain insights into user-centered communication strategies that maintain trust during disruptions.
4. Explore practical solutions for minimizing service interruptions through teamwork.
5. Understand the importance of training and documentation in adapting workflows for improved efficiency.lture of continuous learning and innovation, teams can adapt to changing technologies and user needs.

This presentation gives an overview of interactions between United States (U.S.) copyright law and artificial intelligence (AI). Current generative AI is different from past big data, in that current AI models train on full text long form written works, while in the past, datasets and structured information had the highest value. Also, in recent years, there has been extensive economic activity around AI, which newly surfaced business oriented issues. As a result, new issues have arisen regarding copyright law and AI.

Throughout 2023 and 2024, the U.S. Copyright Office held listening sessions around specific topics related to generative AI and copyright. The Copyright Office released guidance about digital replicas (ie. deep fakes) with guidance yet to come on additional topics including copyrightability of works incorporating AI-generated material, training AI models on copyrighted works, licensing considerations, and liability issues. This presentation gives a just-the-facts summary of U.S. Copyright Office activities, and of emergent case law from lawsuits related to AI and copyright.

A current parallel regulatory thrust is comprehensive U.S. federal regulation of AI ethics. The National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act of 2020 provided funding for a 5 year roll out of AI regulation. With AI ethics regulation in rapid development in the U.S., and legally binding outcomes pending in the near future, large corporations building AI tools have a strong incentive to control the conversation and define AI ethics. By emphasizing copyright, corporations might seek to shift emphasis away from other ethical issues, such as the impacts algorithmic decision making has on people’s lives, increased surveillance, and other ethical issues. For example, it may be the case that ethics discussion is steered towards copyright law and “ethical AI” co-opted to refer to training AI models on licensed content. This presentation considers ethics more broadly, and invites participants to consider how increased focus on copyright and ethics might distract from other ethical issues.

Licensing dovetails with copyright, in that contractual obligations or contractual rights can shift what is allowable and can limit fair use or can expand what is allowed. Generative AI is largely controlled by a handful of very large corporations. High quality training data, such as scholarly articles and other high quality material written by people, tends to be controlled by not-quite-as-large corporations. For example, Google’s market cap is 2.3 trillion U.S. dollars, more than 600 times Clarivate’s market cap of 3.6 billion U.S. dollars. In order to maintain control of assets, in light of a potentially lucrative new use, academic database providers might tend to contractually limit established fair uses like text mining. This presentation brushes on text mining as fair use, and on trends in licensing restrictions.

This presentation overviews recent trends in U.S. copyright law and AI, with emphasis on developing federal regulations and guidance, AI ethics, and the legal right of scholars to do text as impacted by changing licensing practices.

Learning Outcomes

1. Identify the key initiative at the U.S. Copyright Office to address copyright and artificial intelligence issues, and know where to go to quickly find overview information.
2. Know that comprehensive federal regulation of artificial intelligence ethics is currently underway, and the general timeline.
3. Consider artificial intelligence ethics in terms of fairness, accountability, and transparency, and thoughtfully consider the implications when ethics discussion omits any of those key areas.
4. Understand economic issues related to the resource needs and cost to train a generative AI, how consolidated the generative AI industry is, and how incentives differ for a very large tech company like Google versus even the largest academic publishers.
5. Understand that text mining is an established fair use under U.S. copyright law, and that at the same time a contractual restriction in a license agreement can limit rights.

In the summer of 2021, the University of Arizona Libraries (UAL) implemented Reprint Desk’s Article Galaxy Scholar (AGS), a tool that enables users to order on-demand articles not available through the library’s subscriptions. Typically used as a supplement to interlibrary loan services, AGS was adopted by UAL for a multi-year pilot project to address key questions about the library's collection. The pilot aimed to identify which disciplines would most benefit from faster article access compared to the standard interlibrary loan turnaround time, uncover potential gaps in collection coverage across disciplines, and explore opportunities to improve article request fulfillment times.

Learning Outcomes

1. Gain insights into how AGS serves as a self-service document delivery tool for bridging gaps in journal article access.
2. Understand how AGS-generated data informs decisions regarding resource allocation, journal subscriptions, and disciplinary coverage gaps.
3. Recognize the potential for AGS to map collection gaps and guide future subscription decisions.