NASIG 2026

Enjoy this room as a place to pray, meditate, read, relax, or just about anything you need for some self-care.
Please refrain from phone calls and conversation, but you can expect some low-level activity resulting in minimal noise.

Mandy Hurt, Serials Description Librarian and Coordinator, Duke University Libraries, will address cataloging comics.
Heidy Berthoud, who is the Assistant Section Head of the Policy, Training, and Cooperative Programs Division of the Library of Congress, will discuss ethical issues around cataloging and proposing subject and genre headings for zines.

Do you ever try to use a file and find that it’s too big for Excel to handle? Do you need to edit many records at once or combine data from two different tables? OpenRefine — “a powerful free, open source tool for working with messy data” — can make these tasks simpler and faster. In a library setting, your data might come from catalog records, a KBART file, or usage reports. Your goal could be to check for inconsistencies in the catalog that should be corrected, compare e-resource collections, or evaluate usage of existing subscriptions. This interactive workshop will introduce you to the main features of the OpenRefine software, and together we will run through several projects using example files based on real-life projects. We’ll download the software together during the session, so please bring a laptop (Windows, Mac, or Linux) and come ready to participate.

In this talk, Raina Bloom, Reference Services Coordinator for UW-Madison Libraries, will begin with two foundational questions. First, what do librarians know through the work that we do? And, second, what is the purpose of knowing what we know?

Librarians are highly-regarded, trusted, and even beloved, yet misunderstandings about our expertise and skills are common. Additionally, when librarians assert our expertise, negative reactions can range from silence to significant personal and professional consequences. The gap between the general perception of our work and the implications of our expertise can lead to dissonance and difficulty for librarians. 

With The Five Laws of Library Science, S.R. Ranganathan’s 1931 classic of Library and Information Studies as her theoretical frame, Bloom will offer a practice-based analysis of the expertise that librarians develop through our work. She will then apply this analysis to our current moment, sharing examples related to generative AI and reference services, illustrating the potential of librarian expertise to interrupt and complicate broader understandings about information and how people interact with it.

This presentation discusses and shares the results of a research project following the cancellation of the library’s largest journal subscription package. The topic of this presentation is collection analysis, assessment, and development, and also addresses NASIG’s Core Competencies for Electronic Resource Librarians in the area of Research & Assessment (3), specifically numbers 3.2, 3.5, and 3.7. This presentation will cover the collection and analysis of standardized e-resource usage data through different software options and tools such as Microsoft Excel. It will address how to use specific data measures to predict usage and expenditure trends after the cancellation or unbundling of a large subscription package. The presentation additionally covers the topic of user information seeking behavior in how our researchers interact library resources in general, based on these data findings and interviews from a separate but related research endeavor.

There is an incredibly rich and diverse ecosystem of independent films growing every day. For libraries, it can be difficult to navigate how to reach out to an independent filmmaker to get a film from their hard drive into the library catalog.
Acquiring streaming video from small vendors or directly from independent filmmakers often requires significant front-end work by libraries. Navigating how to initiate contact, negotiate terms, and move a film from a creator’s hard drive into the library catalog can be complex and time-consuming. To streamline this process, libraries must clearly identify their expectations around licensing, access, and permitted uses. We must also be prepared to educate vendors and filmmakers who may be unfamiliar with academic libraries. Many creators are eager to make their work available in a university setting but lack guidance on the practical and legal considerations involved.
This session will address common questions, share best practices, and offer strategies for efficiently managing these acquisitions, including how to determine when an acquisition may not be feasible or advisable. It will include examples from my own experience and propose ways in which this work could scale to other libraries

Research metrics shape academic careers, influence funding priorities, and quietly drive inequities across disciplines. Many researchers and subject specialists encounter these systems as neutral or inevitable. In this session, a subject librarian and a scholarly communication librarian examine two intertwined critiques of metric culture. Together, the presenters highlight how deeply metrics structure academic life and discuss ways that scholarly communication librarians can help faculty and subject specialists recognize and resist the ways in which metrics have become the built-in logic of academic institutions with unintended consequences - shaping what research is produced, circulated, and valued.

This presentation offers a case study examining the success of a Transformational Agreement with a consortium member. It demonstrates how a structured TA supports institutions by streamlining collections budgets, improving publication workflows, and advancing the Open Access mission of making research more freely available. The presentation provides dual perspectives from both the library and publisher, illustrating how this partnership was built on aligned goals: increasing OA output, strengthening institutional support, and achieving mutual success.

Slow Librarianship made its debut in 2017 in an In the Library with the Lead Pipe article written by Julia Glassman, but the concept had been around before that with the Slow Food movement that took off in the late 1980s. The idea of Slow, as it applies to our lifestyles, resists the fast-paced culture that modern-day living and technology demand of us and instead encourages us to focus on mindfulness, connection, and quality in a far more sustainable manner.
Combined with limited budget and staffing shortages, the fast-paced culture and exponential growth in technology, libraries and librarians are forced to do more with less. These realities leave us keeping up with large to-do lists, an increased number of meetings, fewer opportunities for authentic connections among colleagues (a challenge we are still facing since the pandemic), more opportunities for errors to arise, and burnout. These challenges are likely to continue along with the fast-paced culture and growth in technology, but it is not sustainable. Emphasizing a slow librarianship approach may be the ultimate tool that saves us all. The approach isn’t a one-size-fits-all, and it will evolve as life naturally does.
“Slow Down for What?” will begin with an overview of the fast-paced culture and the negative impacts it has on our work before providing a more comprehensive overview of slow librarianship and how it counters the fast-paced culture without compromising efficiency and deadlines. From there, “Slow Down for What?” will cover tangible opportunities on how librarians can incorporate slow librarianship into their daily lives to keep up with responsibilities, connect with colleagues, and serve our users in ways that will honor ourselves and allow us to continue our work at a sustainable level. Examples of the tangibles will include, but are not limited to, task management tools, strategies to reign in expectations and set boundaries, and ideas on how to build stronger working relationships. From there, a reflective activity will take place where attendees will take a few minutes to independently respond to prompts such as “What’s one aspect of my role that already incorporates a slow librarianship approach?” and “What’s one area of my role that could benefit from a slow librarianship approach?” While attendees reflect, they will also be invited to share their own tips and tricks on incorporating slow librarianship into their lives, as well as general questions they may have related to the presentation.
Any attendees who are even the slightest bit curious about slow librarianship are invited to attend this session, where they will learn about the origin of slow librarianship, the negative impacts of a fast-paced culture, and how they can incorporate slow librarianship approaches into their lives to resist the fast-paced culture. Attendees will have the opportunity to practice slow librarianship through an independent reflection exercise to demonstrate how easily a slow librarianship approach can be incorporated into our daily lives.

Academic libraries steward large and complex collections to support teaching and research, yet determining how well these collections align with what users produce, seek, and use remains a persistent challenge. Traditional assessment practices rely primarily on circulation and e-resource usage metrics—measures that capture only a fragment of user engagement. These approaches overlook two equally important dimensions: faculty research output, which signals institutional scholarly activity, and user search behaviour, which reflects articulated information needs. This project introduces an integrated framework for collection intelligence: an AI-enabled model that brings together three key data sources—faculty research outputs, user discovery behaviour, and item use—within a unified analytical structure. Using Google Gemini Pro, each dataset is classified with the Library of Congress Classification (LCC) scheme and then analyzed to identify patterns of subject alignment, unmet demand, and emerging areas of scholarly interest. Viewed collectively, these three lenses offer a richer understanding of how library collections correspond to institutional knowledge production and user behaviour. The project moves libraries beyond siloed metrics toward integrated, evidence-based insight. It delivers a scalable, replicable model in which AI serves not only as a classifier but as a connector, linking research activity, discovery practices, and actual use to surface the library’s evolving role in the research ecosystem.

Join your colleagues in Tripp Commons and outside on the Tripp Deck for a menu of of heavy hors d’oeuvres. A selection of soft drinks and alcoholic beverages will be available at a cash/card bar. Stop by the First-Timers tables to welcome new NASIG friends.