Anne Rauh, CLRC Professional Development Award Recipient, Talks About the Electronic Resources & Libraries Conference

1. Artificial Intelligence
2. Collaborative Collection Development
3. Staffing Challenges
4. Open Access

The opening keynote by Kasia Chmielinski, Human Responsibility in the Age of AI, set the stage for conversations throughout the program about AI tools in electronic resources, AI clauses in licensing language, and how AI can create metadate. I attended sessions on both collection building and cancellations within consortium and how libraries worked across multiple institutions to make decisions that would impact the patrons of all the organizations. Throughout most of the sessions that I attended, there was a persistent theme of how libraries are constantly doing more for their patrons, their communities, and their institutions with fewer resources.

Due to my personal interests and my role at Syracuse University Libraries, it is unsurprising that I spent much of my time at the conference attending sessions that addressed open access. These sessions discussed a variety of open access initiatives and work that individual libraries are doing to support equitable access to scholarly content. Additionally, libraries reported on research that demonstrates the impact of their university’s open access publications. The session that I gave, Better Together: Libraries, Consortia, Publishers, and Service Providers working together in an evolving journal ecosystem, emphasized the importance of collaboration among libraries, consortia, publishers, and service providers to navigate the evolving landscape of scholarly journals. We shared specific pain points in evolving models such as Subscribe to Open and Read and Publish agreements from each of our points of view and described why each of our types of organizations were invested in making open access work. The key takeaway was the recognition that cooperation and collaboration among stakeholders are essential for improving access to scholarly content, managing costs, and meeting needs of each of us as open access models evolve.