Many thanks to Matthias Ammon for his reflections on the SLA Annual Conference 2016, which took place in Philadelphia in June. Matthias is working for the Office of Scholarly Communication at the University of Cambridge and attends a part-time distance learning MA course in Information & Library Studies at Aberystwyth University.
Well, the couple of months since the SLA conference have certainly been busy for me: I started a new job, there was rather a lot of political upheaval in the UK and I became an uncle for the first time! In between all of this, however, I have had a chance to reflect on what I have taken away from the conference.
After the excitement of being awarded the ECCA and the very helpful pre-conference prep by SLA and the insider tips by Tracy Z. Maleeff, I was very much looking forward to my first SLA conference. My trip started, somewhat inauspiciously, with watching a film called Library Wars as part of the in-flight entertainment programme. This was truly brilliant/terrible (delete as appropriate according to your enjoyment of Japanese B movies) but happily not a sign of things to come.
On my first evening in Philadelphia I met up for dinner with some of my fellow European chapter members, which was a great way to make some first connections. My fellow ECCA winner Helen has already described the inspiring opening parts of the conference which felt like not only a celebration of individual achievements but of the community of information professionals as a whole.
I was in a slightly unusual position during the conference in that I was literally between jobs (moving from an engineering library to a scholarly communications role) so there had been a bit of a switch of focus in my interests in the time between being awarded the ECCA and attending the conference. In addition, both my old and my new manager were involved in organising and presenting at the conference so I split my time between science/technology and scholarly communication related events. Of course I also attended the evening receptions and made use of the excellent food options available at Reading Terminal Market next door!
Overall, the main theme that emerged for me from the sessions I went to was that the work that (academic) librarians do and are perceived to do is changing. This will not come as a surprise to many but I felt that this was something that came through strongly, not only in the panels and presentation but also in conversations. One aspect of this was the ‘skills gap’ between what librarians are trained in in library school and what skills are needed in ‘new’ areas of librarianship such as scholarly communication. This is partly also reflected in the changes of job descriptions and job titles, particularly with regard to the role of the liaison librarian: there is a move away from subject specialists to jobs like ‘research support librarian’ which require less knowledge of subject content but more of wider frameworks in for example research data management.
There were a couple of case studies based on some of this relatively new kind of work that I found particularly illuminating. Tina Budzise-Weaver of Texas A&M University spoke about her project of measuring impact for a department (Performing Arts) that produced a lot of non-traditional scholarly output and how this had shown value to both the researchers and the administrative hierarchy. The panel this presentation was part of (‘Scholarly communication at a turning point’) also included a lively discussion about the lack of provision of useful metrics by publishers and vendors. Another aspect that was stressed during this session as well as others was the need for institutional support or buy-in to the services libraries may be able to provide with regard to their role in areas such as publishing, research assessment and data management.
Another topic which received a lot of attention was information professionals’ use of data. This ranged from an introduction to copyright law in both the UK and North America (USA and Canada) to examples of how librarians can engage users through making data more accessible. Jan Johansson (Information Manager at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System) gave examples of strategies for extracting data which the owners were reluctant to make available in order to benefit your own institution’s research. Scott Brown (Cybrarian at Oracle Systems) spoke about ways of ‘repackaging’ data to make it interesting even for people who have access to the same information by giving a fresh perspective and marketing it in an engaging manner. I also attended a panel in which information specialists from pharmaceutical companies presented their experiences of text mining for finding out what topics were being discussed by their medical affairs liaisons, for searching for specific genes and for the aim of repurposing drug compounds. One topic that featured strongly in most of the presentations on data was the importance of visualisation to make data more appealing and comprehensible.
For me personally the conference was a great opportunity to learn from information professionals in different sectors and parts of the world other than my own. I have to admit though that flying in on Saturday and back out on Tuesday evening made it a bit of a whirlwind trip and I don’t think I ever fully adapted to the time difference. Straight after returning to the UK I started working for the Office of Scholarly Communication at the University of Cambridge, based in the University Library. It had been very interesting for me to see how other librarians, whether in academia or other sectors, were working on similar issues to the OSC. Part of the work we are doing pertains to addressing several of the problems discussed, particularly with regard to raising awareness of and taking measures to reduce the ‘skills gap’. We also work on a number of issues surrounding the changing landscape in academic publishing and scholarly communication more widely. Basically I felt very reassured about the relevance of my new job! You can follow our work at https://unlockingresearch.blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/
I would once again like to thank SLA Europe and the SLA Science-Technology Division for awarding me an Early Career Conference Award. I hope to stay involved with SLA in the future and to be able to keep exchanging ideas with my fellow practitioners.