By Sarah Helen Carter
From London to Lexington, the ILS Department and IU Bloomington Libraries have made waves at conferences around the globe throughout 2023 and 2024. Students, faculty, staff, alumni and researchers all made major contributions to international, national, and regional meetings of several leading professional organizations, allowing them to help steer the future of information and library science.
86th Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T)
London, England: October 27-31, 2023
The Indiana University Bloomington Information Science program made a major impact on this past year’s ASIS&T conference, as did several students and faculty members.
On the first day of the conference, doctoral student Pei-Ying Chen, former chair of SIG-MET (ASIS&T’s Special Interest Group for the measurement of information production and use), was one of the facilitators for the “Workshop on Informetric, Scientometric, and Scientific and Technical Information Research,” and Assistant Professor Rongqian Ma was one of the facilitators for the workshop, “Visual Research Round-Up.”
The second day, Dr. Ma helped facilitate another workshop, “Exploring Collaborative Interpretive Practice.” In addition, the Doctoral Colloquium, which was organized by Professor Pnina Fichman and Professor Howard Rosenbaum, provided doctoral students with a “supportive and critical learning opportunity to discuss their work, highlight theoretical and methodological problems/issues for further discussion and inquiry with senior mentors and Colloquium participants.”
The Department was especially prevalent on the third day of the conference, as the panel for “Social Informatics Perspectives on Emerging Technologies: The Way Forward” included ILS Department Chair Noriko Hara, Professor Fichman, Postdoctoral Researcher Seung Woo Chae, and Professor Rosenbaum. Dr. Hara said of the panel, “Dr. Fichman and I co-organized this panel to showcase our upcoming edited book on Social Informatics (by Routledge) that includes leading Social Informatics scholars from other iSchools including the Dean of the iSchool at the University of Texas, Austin. The panelists consist of the late Rob Kling’s former students and colleagues as well as emerging SI scholars.”
The penultimate day of the ASIS&T meeting was also an extremely busy one for the Department. Assistant Professor Kahyun Choi opened the day by serving on the panel, “Public Library-University Partnerships in Library and Information Science: Approaches, Challenges, Implications for Translating Research into Practice” alongside faculty from IUPUI. Then, in the evening Dr. Choi presented the paper, “Computational Thematic Analysis of Poetry via Bimodal Large Language Models.” There were also two posters presented by Information Science Doctoral students that day: Alexandra Wingate’s “Novels and the NSTC: A Quantitative Study of Legal Deposit” as well as Jieli Liu and Ravi Regulagedda’s “Social Network Analysis of Misinformation Spreading and Science Communication During COVID-19.”
On the final day of the conference, Dr. Ma and Doctoral student Alexandra Wingate served on the panel “Evaluating the Value of Exploratory Tools in Digital Humanities Collections and Scholarly Projects: Discussions from Researchers, Developers, and Users’ Perspectives.” A paper co-authored by Associate Professor John Walsh, “Tuning out the Noise: Benchmarking Entity Extraction for Digitized Native American Literature,” was also presented that day.
Professor Rosenbaum, who received the 2023 Association for Information Science and Technology Watson Davis Award for Distinguished Service during the conference, thought it was “wonderful to see so many ILS colleagues – faculty and students – at the ASIST conference in London presenting their work and supporting each other, attending each others’ talks.”
2023 American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference & Exhibition
Chicago, IL: June 22-27, 2023
The ALA Annual Conference & Exhibition is the world’s largest library event and several representatives from IU Bloomington were in attendance. Heather Sloan, Maps Assistant at IU’s Wells Library, gave a presentation during the conference titled “The Midwest Indigenous Cartography Project” as part of the “Sharing Knowledge: Projects and Outreach for Indigenous Patrons, Languages, and Documents” panel. She gave this presentation on behalf of the Midwest Indigenous Cartography Project research team, which, in addition to Sloan, also includes two IU ILS alumni — nicholae cline, Librarian for Media Studies, Gender Studies, & Philosophy at Wells Library, and Theresa Quill, Maps and Spatial Data Librarian at Wells Library — as well as two IU student research assistants including Cheyenne Brenton.
Other attendees included ILS faculty members Devan Donaldson and Howard Rosenbaum as well as Joanna M. Millunchick, Dean of the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. A special reception for ILS alumni was also held during the conference.
“I was happy to attend ALA to connect with our alumni so that we can learn more about what they’ve done since they’ve left our program, and they can learn more about what we’re currently doing here at the Luddy School,” said Donaldson. “Networking with alumni has the potential to create job opportunities for our current students, which we think is really important. I was also pleased to take part in the alumni reception we hosted for our alumni. Doing things like that lets them know that we are thinking of them, and we care about them.”
Society of Indiana Archivists (SIA) Annual Meeting
Indianapolis, Indiana: March 31, 2023
The Society of Indiana Archivists Annual Meeting provided archivists across the state with an invaluable forum to exchange information and ideas about archival collections and best practices being implemented at institutions across the state. Archivists from across Indiana University campuses were heavily involved in the conference. IU Bloomington’s Director of University Archives, Dina Kellams, served as a representative of the Indiana State Historic Records Advisory Board in a listening session on the professional development needs of Indiana’s archival community.
Midwest Archives Conference (MAC)
Chicago, IL: April 13-15, 2023
Following on the heels of the SIA Annual Meeting, the Midwest Archives Conference allowed archivists across IU campuses as well as Archives & Records Management students and alumni to learn from and share ideas with fellow archivists across thirteen midwestern states.
Brianna McLaughlin, Digital Collections Librarian at IU Bloomington’s Wells Library, was one of the speakers in the “Digging Deep into Reparative Description” panel discussion. McLaughlin found it “inspiring to be amongst so many library professionals who were also dedicated to making archival materials safer for all users.”
Transformación: 51st Annual Conference of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA)
Mexico City, Mexico: April 18-21, 2023
The 2023 ARLIS/NA annual conference was themed “Transformación” to reflect the Society’s “launch into our next fifty years on a journey of transformation and growth.” At the conference, Amy Minix, IU Bloomington’s Neuro- and Health Sciences Librarian and ILS alum, embodied that theme through the interdisciplinary poster “Expanding Visual Thinking Strategies to Incorporate Identity & Health Disparities in a Nursing Course.” Minix felt that “presenting at ARLIS/NA was a wonderful venue to talk with art librarians about my experience as a subject librarian in the health sciences using art to promote visual literacy skills. The cherry on top was being able to visit the Frida Kahlo Museum (La Casa Azul) and seeing the personal relics of the artist whose work was featured on our ARLIS/NA poster and the focus of the Visual Thinking Strategy activity.”
ARCHIVES*RECORDS 2023
Washington, DC: July 26-29, 2023
ARCHIVES*RECORDS 2023, the Joint Annual Meeting of the Council of State Archivists and the Society of American Archivists, offered countless opportunities for archivists and records managers from around the country to exchange ideas in our nation’s capital.
Jeremy Floyd, Project Archivist at the IU Bloomington University Archives and IU ILS alum, was one of the speakers in the “Wikidata and the Archives: Reports on Linked Open Data Projects” session. Floyd’s presentation, “Agents, Name Authorities, and Linked Open Data: Leveraging Wikidata for Access and Discovery of Archival Materials” discussed current and future uses of Wikidata at IU.
2023 International Association of Music Libraries (IAML) Congress
Cambridge, England: July 30-August 4, 2023
Several representatives from the Indiana University Bloomington Cook Music Library attended and were highly involved in presentations throughout this past year’s annual congress of the International Association of Music Libraries.
Chuck Peters, Head of Cataloging at the Cook Music Library, served as the chair for the panel “Music programmes and changing realities: protecting collections, providing access,” which also featured a presentation from Anthony Tadey, Lead Multimedia Production Specialist for the Cook Music Library. Peters was also one of the presenters for the presentation “Music open educational resources in IAML member libraries: discovering new sources, evaluating materials, and providing access” as well as the “Discoveries from Thomas Binkley Collection at the Cook Music Library at Indiana University, United States, towards the reconstruction of the history of Studio der frühen Musik” presentation on the “Performing arts collections in North America” panel. He also chaired the working meeting of the Libraries in Music Teaching Institutions Section.
Laikin Dantchenko, Sound Recordings Cataloging Librarian at the Cook Music Library, gave the presentation “Войны Для Воинов: the Far-reaching poetics of 1980’s Soviet punk music and political dissent in the Lavrov Collection at Indiana University Cook Music Library” as part of the “Rediscovering collections and repertories” panel. And Misti Shaw, Associate Director, Access and Learning Associate Librarian, was one of the presenters of “Does using a BEAM approach in library instruction improve student outcomes?” in the “Digital humanities and pedagogy” section.
82nd Annual Meeting of the Music Library Association Midwest Chapter (MLAMW)
Lexington, Kentucky: November 2-4, 2023
The 2023 Music Library Association Midwest Chapter Meeting was hosted by the University of Kentucky Libraries, with sessions taking place at the University’s Lucille C. Little Fine Arts Library and the Campbell House hotel. Indiana University Bloomington’s Cook Music Library was exceptionally well-represented at the meeting, with several presentations given by Music Library staff and students.
Tarren Sexton, an MLS student in the Music Librarianship specialization, gave a presentation titled “Audio Rapid Cataloging at Indiana University.”
Sarah Helen Carter, an MLS and MIS student in the Music Librarianship and Archives & Records Management specializations, presented a poster titled “The Archives as a Muse: Incorporating Primary Sources into the Student Works of Undergraduate Composers.”
Allison McClanahan, IU MLS alum and former Collections and Cataloging Librarian at the Archives of Traditional Music, and Laikin Dantchenko, Sound Recordings Cataloging Librarian at the Cook Music Library, presented “Nurturing Inclusivity: Empowering Patrons and Creators in Library Collections.
Chuck Peters, Head of Cataloging at the Cook Music Library, gave a presentation entitled “Uses of Music Educational Resources in IAML Member Libraries: Preliminary Survey Results” alongside Carla Williams Music Subject Specialist at Ohio University.
2023 Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) Young Adult Services Symposium
St. Louis, Missouri: November 10-12, 2023
The Young Adult Services Symposium – held by YALSA, the division of the American Library Association focused specifically on young adult services – provided librarians across the country with the opportunity to connect and share resources and projects that specifically serve young adult library patrons.
During the Symposium, Assistant Professor Kahyun Choi was one of the presenters of “AI Literacy for Libraries,” which detailed the ongoing IMLS-funded project “AI & Co-design in Public Libraries: Empowering Underserved Youth to Cultivate Symbiotic Relationships between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Their Communities.” Dr. Choi also co-presented a virtual education session further discussing the project called “Hands-On AI Literacy Programs for Youth” shortly after the Symposium.
93rd Meeting of the Music Library Association (MLA)
Cincinnati, Ohio: February 28-March 2, 2024
The annual meeting of the Music Library Association, the national professional association for US music librarians, was at the historic Cincinnati Netherlands Plaza hotel. IU Music Librarianship alumni and current Music Library staff carried their momentum from the Midwest regional meeting to present even more fascinating work to their colleagues.
Billy Scharfenberger and Thi Lettner, both recent graduates from the IU MLS Program, gave the presentation “What Barriers Do Music Students Encounter When Searching?” alongside Misti Shaw, Associate Director of Access and Learning at the Cook Music Library. Lettner felt that it was “an incredible honor and absolute pleasure to go from reading the work of these librarians to working alongside them.”
Chuck Peters, Head of Cataloging at the Cook Music Library, and Carla Williams, Music Subject Specialist at Ohio University, presented “Uses of Open Music Educational Resources in IAML Member Libraries: Survey Results.” The presentation was a follow-up to their presentation at the Music Library Association Midwest Annual Meeting.
Laikin Dantchenko, Sound Recordings Cataloging Librarian at IU’s Cook Music Library, gave multiple fascinating presentations over the course of the conference. She and Jack Haig Nighan, Senior Media Cataloger at Wells Library, presented “Protecting Musical Heritage: Reparative Cataloging of Ukrainian Music Resources at Indiana University.” “It was an honor to present on the importance of accurate, reparative cataloging that preserves Ukrainian heritage,” said Nighan. In crafting culturally informed descriptions of musical works, we can set the record straight and ensure authentic representation in our libraries.”
Dantchenko also presented alongside Freja Cole, Cook Music Library Circulation Supervisor, during the Best of Chapters session. Their presentation, “Resources for Representation: Supporting Discovery of Gender Diverse Creators in Music,” was first presented at the 81st Annual Meeting of the Music Library Association Midwest Chapter in 2022 where it won the Best of Chapters Competition. Reflecting on her presentations at the most recent IAML, MLA Midwest Chapter, and MLA National meetings, Dantchenko stated that “At each event, I encountered enthusiastic engagement with the topic of inclusive cataloging within our library descriptive standards, along with valuable feedback on how to enhance my own projects further. The collaborative spirit pervasive in our field of library science has been a source of immense fortune for me. It underscores the dedication and values inherent in our profession.”