NASIG 2025

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

In this keynote address speaker Amy Tureen imagines what libraries and librarianship could look like if employee wellness was as sacrosanct as other professional values such as access, equity, intellectual freedom, and privacy.

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.

This session will explore what steps stakeholders from libraries, publishers, and infrastructure providers might take together to operationalize open access business processes. Maureen Walsh, Scholarly Strategist, The Ohio State University Libraries, will reflect on her almost two decades of involvement in Ohio State’s open access programs and initiatives and share her perspective on the current pain points of supporting open access publishing agreements. New open access business models have outpaced the development of efficient and effective open access workflows in libraries. Beyond the financial commitment of open access agreements, libraries are absorbing significant staff costs to manage open access workflows. Attendees will bring different perspectives and ideas toward business process solutions for libraries supporting open access publishing agreements.

Learning Outcomes

1. Gain a wider perspective on the challenges of library support for open access
2. Learn about the interdependencies with all of the stakeholders in the open access landscape—libraries and their institutions, researchers, publishers, infrastructure providers, and funders
3. Possible solutions and best practices for managing open access agreements

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.

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.

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

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.