NASIG 2025

Join the NASIG Board for an overview of the conference and daily announcements.

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

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.

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

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.