NASIG 2025

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

The Electronic Serials Cataloging Workshop will introduce attendees to current standards and practices, elements and terminology used in the cataloging of electronic serials. This course is based on Resource Description and Access (RDA) as interpreted by current CONSER policy and practice with special attention paid to the differences in the cataloging of print and electronic serials. Attendees will work through exercises which will include use of current tools and documentation. Attendees should be familiar with the MARC bibliographic standard. Knowledge of print serials cataloging practices is also helpful (but not required).

This workshop is for library workers who want to get started on collection assessment, but who may not have the resources to launch large projects or programs. The workshop will guide participants through designing and acting on micro-assessment projects for library collections. A micro-assessment is a small collection assessment project aligned with your resources and your organizational priorities. It is tightly scoped and time-bound, designed to inform a specific collections decision or strategy. A thoughtfully designed micro-assessment can offer both actionable insights into your collections and valuable learning opportunities for library staff interested in collections work.

Through instructor-provided case studies and other exercises, workshop participants will practice (1) identifying narrowly focused, action-oriented collection micro-assessment projects; (2) scoping those micro-projects to align with available staff time and expertise; and (3) using small, manageable amounts of data to speak directly to a decision or action. Along the way, participants will learn practical tips for ensuring micro-assessments can also become the building blocks for a larger collection assessment program. As a final activity, participants will draft a micro-assessment proposal for their own institutions.

The proliferation of open access business models has left libraries a step behind in the management of open access business processes. Open access support is often reliant on fragmented infrastructure. The institutional cost of open access is not limited to covering author-side payments or financially supporting fee-free open access publishing. There is an often-unrecognized labor issue. The lack of industry standard metadata and reporting mechanisms for open access business processes across the various stakeholders (e.g., libraries, publishers, data and infrastructure providers) has led libraries to individually develop manual workflows that stitch together disparate publisher dashboards, manual reporting mechanisms, data platforms, and their own institutional systems. In many libraries, supporting open access is new work that is covered by existing staff without additional resources to support the ever-increasing workload. Where this work is done in libraries, and by whom, can vary widely. This session will highlight how The Ohio State University Libraries is addressing the challenges of supporting open access in a landscape bereft of open access business process standards. This session will explore what steps stakeholders from libraries, publishers, and infrastructure providers might take together to operationalize open access business processes in a coordinated move away from individualized, manual labor heavy, legacy workflows still mired in a subscription world.

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.