How can science libraries contribute to knowledge equity? University of Toronto (UofT) Science Libraries participated in the Toronto Black History Edit-A-Thon in 2021 and 2022 to help increase the visibility of Black people in STEM, whose lives and contributions are under-documented in the cultural record. Library workers are experts in information creation, organization, and dissemination, all valuable skills for knowledge equity initiatives. As an open-source platform and the largest, most-read reference work in history, Wikipedia is a powerful tool for knowledge equity intervention because it can increase visibility for marginalized groups. In this short presentation, two Librarians and two Information Science students from UofT’s Science Libraries will describe the science library team’s experiences, outcomes, and takeaways from the Toronto Black History Edit-A-Thon.

Objectives We participated in the edit-a-thon to bring knowledge equity into practice by documenting the lives and accomplishments of Black people in STEM. Another objective was to equip Information Science students with skills in researching and writing about science histories.

Methods We searched UofT Libraries’ collections and online sources to compile a list of Black professionals and researchers in STEM who either lacked Wikipedia articles or had articles with content gaps. During the edit-a-thon, these consulted sources (articles, books, obituaries, etc.) were used to make a variety of contributions, including adding biographical information, adding references, creating access points by linking articles, and authoring new articles. Furthermore, science libraries staff helped facilitate the edit-a-thon, assisting with event organization, teaching Wikipedia instructional sessions, and 1-on-1 support with novice editors.

Results In February 2021, the science libraries team contributed 55,463 bytes of changes to Wikipedia, or 26% of the event’s overall contributions. The ongoing 2022 event has already generated many edits, including 27 updated articles and 7 new articles. Moreover, we gained experience and skills in research, instruction, and content writing. Challenges included difficulties finding significant coverage in reliable sources about Black people in STEM, the brevity and undocumented facts within these resources, which made writing for these individuals challenging.

Conclusions Our presentation will conclude that libraries can provide leadership in tackling knowledge-based inequities in STEM due to their role as a key information infrastructure and the information literacy skills possessed by their workers. The Toronto Black History Edit-A-Thon is one such opportunity to bridge the gap between the accomplishments of Black people in STEM and their documentation within the cultural record. Additionally, the experience outcomes are valuable for library workers’ professional development and align with library core values. We will consider future directions for library-based interventions in representational justice and suggest that there should be heightened consideration of Wikipedia as a means of promoting knowledge equity in the sciences. Studies documenting any indexing concerns are warranted to identify issues and make sources about Black individuals in STEM more discoverable.

The WikiJournals are a suite of open access, open peer reviewed academic journals that seek to integrate the contents of articles submitted to the journals back into Wikipedia and to provide a stable DOI for original articles. The WikiJournal User Group comprises four subject areas: WikiJournal of Medicine, WikiJournal of Science, WikiJournal of Psychology, Psychiatry, and Behavioral Sciences, and the WikiJournal of Humanities. The goal of the WikiJournals is to bridge the gap between the academic community and Wikipedia, allow for original research to be published within the Wiki sphere, and to increase access to information. As the mission of the Wikijournals is to publish scholarly articles at no cost to authors, publishing in WikiJournals is gaining momentum, and is currently overlooked as a viable option for the open access movement in academia. In addition, the transparency of the peer review process is an opportunity to teach students about the scholarly conversation, see the application of peer review in action, and to open dialogue about the open access process.. As part of the article submission process, peer reviewed articles are then entered into the Wikipedia live article space, increasing the number of people who can see a scholar’s work. This has implications for altmetrics that go beyond the traditional scholarly journal. I will talk about the evolution of the four journals, the process of getting indexed in the big name indexing services, gaining acceptance into the open access realm, the transparency of peer review, and the uniqueness of the international membership of the editorial board across all three journals. Through this presentation I hope to raise awareness of the WikiJournal model and to gather thoughts and questions from the library community to bring back to the WikiJournals User Group.

In Fall 2021, the Engineering Liaison Librarians and the First-Year Experience Librarian collaborated on an outreach event to introduce students to library services, focusing on patent searching services. This outreach event, entitled “Name That Patent!”, engaged students in a patent identification game using the Kahoot! online game platform. During the game students were introduced to patents and patent searching techniques. Specifically, this game targeted first-year STEM students, introducing them to the library and librarians as a research resource. This session will cover the planning, marketing, execution, and results of the “Name That Patent!” event.

The goal of this proposal is to present an ongoing initiative to support STEM education in the context of a science library. I hope this case will generate opportunities for meaningful exchange of information and guidance among STEM librarians who have implemented or plan to implement similar projects. A short description of the project is provided below.

The Marston Science Library (MSL) Curriculum Project at the University of Florida (UF) is intended to support STEM education and the university’s scientific community. The MSL focuses on five primary disciplines: agriculture, biological sciences, chemical & physical sciences, engineering, and mathematics & statistics. To optimize learning opportunities and further enhance access to these resources, the science librarians will develop an evidence-based and learner-centered curriculum. The structure of the curriculum will provide instructional and practical support to meet learners where they are and provide opportunities for recognition, learning, and knowledge transfer.

The MSL curriculum will follow a modular approach that allows learners and instructors to select learning materials based on their specific needs and contexts. The instructional modules will be based on core concepts (e.g., information literacy) and content-specific areas (e.g., engineering databases). Each module will feature instructional videos, step-by-step tutorials, and short assessment items to support comprehension and self-regulated learning skills. Following Bloom’s Taxonomy, the assessment items will be developed to cover a range of cognitive and behavioral components: a) remember; b) understand; c) apply; d) analyze; e) evaluate; and f) create. Additionally, inquiry, reflection, and action – tenets of a critical literacy perspective – will be embedded throughout the curriculum to reflect the university’s commitment to inclusive and culturally responsive pedagogies.

Implementation guides, consultations, and instructor-librarian collaborations will be available to increase the scalability of the resources and motivate patrons to continue their learning journey beyond the curriculum.

In 2014, the Engineering & Computer Science Library at the University of Toronto created a Twitter account as part of our outreach program. This was our first step into exploring social media. We started this account in part from the pressure that it appeared every academic library was on social media at the time, and we wanted to be part of the trend. We poured hours of work into our account and on the surface, our ‘engagement’ metrics appeared to provide a good return. However, after taking a deeper dive into our user community demographics, compared our Twitter to that of other engineering libraries, University of Toronto Libraries and engineering departments, the return on investments on the literal (not figurative!) hours per week we spent maintaining the account was low. With the addition of evidence starting to rise that social media had an impact on mental health, it appeared social media was at odds with the mental health backbone of our outreach program. As a result, our library took down our one and only social media account (gasp!) and has been a social media free library since! The time spent maintaining our account were used instead on more interactive outreach activities. This talk will briefly describe our acquiring, maintaining, assessing, and dismantling of our social media account and also highlight some of the dangers of social media on mental health.

Have you considered going up for promotion or in need of achieving tenure? Ever wondered how to manage your everyday duties as a STEM liaison librarian while simultaneously working on scholarship and service? Well look no further! Our session will address how to ace your next promotion and tenure while handling the multiple duties of STEM librarianship. In this short presentation, two STEM librarians will share their success stories in achieving both an early and late career promotion while balancing their subject liaison duties. Techniques will be highlighted to showcase how a Science Librarian collaborated with an Engineering & Computer Science Librarian to achieve their promotion goals to the Associate Librarian and University Librarian ranks. During the session we will showcase the importance of how collaborating with your liaison librarian/s can be mutually beneficial for achieving promotion. In the examples that will be shared, how one balances their everyday duties in areas such as: diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) in STEM librarianship; supporting international students; taking on data librarian roles and responsibilities; developing OER resources; and supporting research impact and metrics of success will be discussed. Attendees will: (1) gain knowledge on how to apply successful promotion and tenure strategies to their specific job and institution (2) learn helpful stress-relief related plans of action and (3) acquire skills on how to navigate relationships between collaborative colleagues Don’t miss out on this important and insightful session as we discuss several successful strategies for achieving promotion and tenure.

Having a good working relationship with the faculty of the university is essential to an academic librarian job performance. But what should a librarian do who emails their faculty with reminders of information classes every semester and only ends up with silence?

I have been a librarian at Stephen F. Austin State University for three years now. One of the first things I did was to meet with all of the Department Chairs for my liaison areas, which include the STEM subjects. I also attended department meetings to introduce myself to all of the faculty.

The issue seems to be with the established faculty. I have had a couple of the older faculty contact me for information classes, but those have been few. I have been more successful with the newer, incoming faculty. At the beginning of each Fall semester, the university holds a new faculty orientation where we, the librarians, are given a chance to introduce ourselves to the new faculty. I have had a lot of success with connecting with new faculty and encouraging them to include library sessions if there is a research or paper portion for any of their classes. I am still struggling with our more established faculty and I welcome any and all suggestions.

Why do most &*$! information literacy initiatives in academic libraries fail? Is it our fault? Do faculty really care? How do we move forward? These questions form the basis of a problem not often openly discussed in librarian circles. We celebrate what works, but rarely dig deeper to find out why we fail to thrive with instructional initiatives.

Ian Gordon, Teaching & Learning Librarian leads with a firm chin reflecting on 30+ years of experience, thick skin, and having been the lead investigator on three recently published scholarly papers on chemists , mathematicians , and physicists ‘ information-seeking behaviors. The resulting and entertaining discussion will help shed light on opportunities (and challenges) for academic librarians to identify and meet STEM researchers evolving information needs. Building on Michelle Reale’s Meeting the Challenge of Teaching Information Literacy , come with your collective advice. Bring a story of success. Share a lived experience of triumphing over indifference, challenged, busy, and overwhelmed faculty… as we continue to raise the information literacy banner. What is your 4-letter word?

The problem, “How best to sell the value of information literacy to STEM researchers and faculty?”

Do you have any advice or takeaways on getting buy-in and impact in hard-to-reach STEM disciplines, for example Computer Science, Chemistry, and Engineering? Our college’s STEM support is successful in some disciplines, but not in some we consider impactful for student success. Without faculty buy-in and partnership our impact on student success in these hard-to-reach STEM disciplines is minimal. We offer that some STEM disciplines are not good matches for library support and partnership, and we’re not attempting to reach all STEM disciplines.

As part of its new strategic planning cycle, Elon University has created two new STEM departments: Nursing and Engineering. In response to this growing emphasis on STEM, Belk Library is in the process of hiring a second science research librarian. Beginning summer 2022, the library will split outreach and instruction for the sciences between two librarians, with one taking over the life and health sciences and the other managing the physical sciences and engineering.

Whether it’s having someone to help develop and test new ideas or simply having a second pair of hands to lighten the reference and instruction load, bringing aboard a second STEM librarian is an undeniably exciting prospect. However, building a partnership presents unique challenges, and letting go of established habits, routines, and practices is never easy. Moreover, the need to form relationships with Elon’s two new STEM programs adds a further layer of complexity to the library’s shifting situation.

The questions prompted by the university and Belk Library’s near future are numerous and daunting: how are durable, successful partnerships between STEM librarians formed, and what do those relationships look like? Can liaison duties be managed collaboratively or are they necessarily discrete responsibilities? What does it mean to successfully transfer outreach and instruction areas from one librarian to another, and what does it take to accomplish that? How are relationships between the library and new STEM disciplines founded? What makes library-department relationships lasting and robust?

This presentation is a call for any guidance, experience, and advice the STEM Librarians Collaborative can offer on navigating any or all these changes.

We are a small, agile STEM librarian team that provides support to STEM scholars at Florida State University. Traditionally, our department has focused on providing subject librarian support to our assigned academic departments. This support has focused on collection development, hunting down hard to find resources, and teaching students how to search the library databases. However, in the past few years our team has acquired skills and expertise in the areas of research data management, geographic information science (GIS), open data, and open science. These emerging areas are becoming more critical to the success of STEM research and instruction. Thus, our department is providing more data support and collaborating with faculty and students on data-related projects. At the same time, there is still a need to provide traditional subject support to our FSU STEM scholars and collaborate with our colleagues to build programs that develop information literacy skills for the researchers at our institution. During this session, we would like to open a dialogue and solicit recommendations and advice from STEM librarian colleagues who have faced similar questions in how to balance data services and traditional subject librarianship duties.

The story of a librarian who started with a dumb terminal at her first position and now successfully works with an iPad and other advanced technology.

My career has allowed me to witness and participate in the fastest period of technological and scientific growth in human history. When I began working, libraries essentially ran via paper – physical stacks organized by card catalogs and paper indexes. Then I took a job working for a medical library where I performed searches for patrons via a dumb terminal and a phone modem. Later I performed searches at a NASA IAC via a personal computer with inch 3.5 inch drive. Years ago people outside of an academic institution relied on libraries or information centers such as NASA TAC to perform searches in databases non-academics had never heard of or seen much less searched. Librarians enjoyed the pre-Internet days before yahoo, world-wide-web and google.

I never imagined the speed of change involving computers and technology. The changes in computers and technology accelerated changes in the field of librarianship as well. Job functions changed as well now librarians perform many functions via a computer. As technology advances reached the public database searching switched from the librarian to the public. Librarians switched from performing database searches to teaching and assisting patrons with database searches. The background in searching and various searching techniques provides me with a depth of knowledge not available to internet users today.

Not only the functions of librarians switched with the technology changes but the changes within technology especially computers caused some equipment conflicts. At one point in my career, I could change the parts in my computer, now one cannot distinguish many of the computer parts if you opened the computer. The reduction of computer parts to the nanoscale size part of the scientific technology advances prevents one from seeing or replacing parts. A technology guru or specialist is required for any type of repair or they request that you replace your computer rather than fix it.

Communication with colleagues changed drastically over my career. Once we gathered to share knowledge and then afterwards we spent time writing letters or performing phone calls to ask follow up questions. Email was unheard of at this time. I experienced email initially at the Lawrence Livermore Lab. Emails were rather short in those days and SPAM emails did not exist. The largest influence on the changes in Librarianship over my career would be the technological changes in the last forty plus years.

Does “Research Data Management” (RDM) seem too abstract a concept to you? Come join a fellow STEM librarian in playing with real datasets to learn RDM concepts that will help you incorporate RDM into your teaching and service. Attendees will look at real data management plans and published datasets to learn the concepts of data management planning, metadata dictionaries, documentation, quality assurance, and quality control. No experience or knowledge of RDM is needed, this session is intended for novices.

At Florida State University Libraries, we have been expanding our data analysis and visualization upskilling opportunities to include more open source tools. Our goal is to enable students to build an “open toolbox” that they can take with them when they graduate. While we still teach workshops on proprietary tools such as Microsoft Excel and MatLab, creating more offerings that showcase free and open source software advance the library’s strategic goals related to providing equitable access to information as well as providing technical infrastructure and skills that advance innovative and emerging forms of research.

This short talk will detail the library’s process in developing partnerships and services that connect our scholars with open tools that enable them to ideate, create, share stories and ideas using data. This session will include recommendations for other institutions trying to do the same as well as a discussion of some of the challenges that we have encountered along the way. The talk will also include a discussion of what tools we chose to use and why. Engagement strategies and effective partnerships were a primary driver in our initiative’s success and those insights will also be shared during this presentation.

Several global health crises including the Ebola epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated that barriers to disseminating science were removed or lessened. Enter: the preprint. Preprints are non-peer reviewed articles that are either a final working draft or the paper that has been submitted for publication. Preprints were made available online for the medical community in public-access servers/databases such as bioRxiv, medRxiv, and Pubmed in the effort to disseminate ground-breaking treatments. Physics has a long history of the use of preprints and preprint servers such as aRxiv as a way to disseminate and receive feedback on scientific thought, but other disciplines were unaware of what a preprint was or how to identify one. In the flurry to reduce the barriers of scientific discovery for clinical practitioners and physicians, several preprints became infamous in the medical communities—and in the era of the 24-hour news cycle—the general public. The library literature has yet to discuss the importance of the preprint, oftentimes because librarians are left out of the conversation. In this short presentation, I will share: my experience of teaching the preprint to a group of epidemiology students (HSC 401), how preprints affected the students’ scholarly work, and how you can start using preprints in your instruction sessions or faculty consultations.

It is known that graduate students work with research data more intimately than their faculty mentors. Because of this, much data management education is geared toward this population. However, student learning has predominantly been assessed through measures of satisfaction and attendance rather than through evaluating knowledge and skills acquired.

This presentation reports results from a study that attempts to advance assessment efforts by asking students to report their knowledge and practice changes before, immediately after, and 6 months following a data management education program. This program is unique in that it uses student research projects as the focus for learning, uses a flipped classroom model for data management education which is not often done for that content, and presents the data management practice principles in a way that highlights their interdependent nature.

Graduate students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and health science disciplines self-enrolled in an 8-week pilot data management program that used their research projects as the focus for learning. Three surveys were administered (pre-, post-, and 6 months following) to determine changes in students’ knowledge and practices regarding data management skills through self-assessment. The survey consisted of approximately 115 Likert-style questions and covered major aspects of the data life cycle.

Results presented will show that students increased their data management knowledge and improved their skills in all areas of the data life cycle and that for most practices, students consistently implemented them through the 6-month follow-up period.

STEM librarians will understand that the impact of data management education can last beyond immediate instruction when approached holistically and with in-depth assessment. In addition, this presentation will communicate which topic areas this data management education is effective and in which areas it needs further support allowing STEM librarians to focus their data management education efforts.

In a 2015 article, Wendy Walker and Teressa Keenan highlighted the importance of providing “truly accessible research data”: research data that are not merely available, but accessible to all users, including those with disabilities.However, as we began to explore this topic in 2021, we found that in the 6 years since, the conversation about accessible research data that Walker and Keenan hoped to start has, mostly, not occurred. As funder, journal, and disciplinary norms and mandates have foregrounded obligations of data sharing and opportunities for data reuse, the need to plan for and curate data sets which can reach researchers and end-users with disabilities has become even more urgent.

STEM librarians have been increasingly tasked with data responsibilities: facilitating access to data for Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Natural language processing techniques; serving as experts in data management and sharing for grant development and project implementation; and leading as educators across the data lifecycle. We, therefore, have a specific obligation to foreground accessibility in order to ensure inclusion of all of our researchers and students. It is critical that we identify opportunities to improve data to facilitate use by all interested parties, rather than further reinforcing ableist practices.

This keynote draws from our mixed expertise as a data and medical liaison librarian, a social science data repository executive director, and a PhD candidate in Disability Studies. We present a call for, and a description of, first steps towards, understanding challenges specifically related to data sharing and curation and accessibility. Together, we will survey the landscape of curation guidelines and standards which finds very little consideration of accessibility for people with disabilities. We will briefly explore the disability studies literature and the need for advocacy and representation of disabled scholars as data creators, subjects, and users. And we will identify the impact of our own early advocacy in changing current practice and identify pragmatic first steps and questions STEM librarians can take to adopt initial practices for truly accessible data — including advocating for web-accessible data repositories, ensuring accessibility of common text format, including those used in documentation, and enhancing visual and audiovisual materials.

Accessibility — in the sense of making data usable by all reusers – needs to become a mainstreamed component of research data work, included in every training, manual, software tool, and repository. With this call to action, we point to some early and ongoing signs of progress towards truly accessible data by highlighting exemplary practices by repositories, standards, and data professionals and invite others to seek opportunities to participate.

This presentation will discuss an active learning session designed to help undergraduate students in the sciences engage with scholarly publishing, peer review, open access, and predatory publications. The Cell and Molecular Biology students at my institution must participate in research as part of their program. As a result, many begin to receive emails soliciting article submissions for journals before they have been introduced to important concepts in scholarly publishing. In this session, I invite students to treat journal websites like dating profiles. They identify “red flags” and “green flags” about the journal—a “red flag” might be that the stated time to publication is too short for peer review, while a “green flag” may be that the cost for Open Access publishing is clearly stated and easy to find—and discuss these in a group setting as an introduction to the complex discussion of journal evaluation. This session uses a conceptual metaphor—choosing a journal is like choosing a date—as a catalyst of learning transfer.

Additionally, after this lesson, students report feeling more confident investigating journals and are able to describe open access publishing and identify potential predatory publication techniques. In my presentation, I will share my lesson plan and activity materials, describe a typical session, and highlight the major concepts the class uses in discussion post-activity

In this presentation how librarians/libraries could support educators and students to successfully utilize STEM OER materials at primarily undergraduate institutions (PUI) will be discussed. Open Education Resources (OER) are easily accessible, openly licensed course materials available for educators, students, and self-learners to use and re-use for teaching, learning and research. Educators and students in higher education are confronted by rising costs of quality textbooks, articles in recent times. Over the years, several organizations and expert individuals have contributed to develop quality open education resources for a wide range of STEM disciplines with current updates. Especially for entry level college courses, several quality peer reviewed textbooks and course modules are available, for example, Openstax for STEM fields. OER are easily available with minimal or no restrictions for academic users. Despite several advantages of OER in STEM education, it is often underutilized. Most faculties and students at primarily undergraduate institutions (PUI) are unaware of OER, and also, they are worried about content quality, availability of materials for upper-level courses, and faculties are uncertain due to lack of time to evaluate. Libraries can fill in this void to promote OER to educators and students by creating a sustainable OER collection in any medium for STEM disciplines at their library. To achieve this, librarians must identify user needs in supporting undergraduate curriculum and research through various practices. For example, a survey can be conducted where faculty and students can provide both qualitative and quantitative responses, which can guide the creation of an OER collection where user needs are considered. Further, librarians could play a vital role by evaluating OER materials in collaboration with faculties based on whether the materials are peer-reviewed and created by expertise in respective fields to provide reliable and quality OER learning materials to library users.

Through my experiences coaching undergraduate students through IRB Applications and CITI Training, I’ve developed a greater sense of social justice. I hope to share my work engaging them in open discussions about ethical practices, confronting (un)conscious biases, and identifying appropriate research methods. As a STEM Librarian, I’ve collaborated with other Faculty to support students as they complete their Senior Capstones and Theses, often on topics that require them to consider the history of exploitation and resulting distrust of diverse populations. My approaches to these conversations vary and always include discussions of Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Access (IDEA).

My lightning talk will discuss the details of an affordable outreach activity conducted by Library staff in collaboration with the Chemistry department as part of the Atlanta Science Festival. For less than $50, we helped over 130 kids and parents make cyanotypes during the science festival event. I will talk about how we gathered all of the necessary

materials, how we prepared for a rainy day, how we coordinated with the chemistry department, and some of the lessons we learned.

Cyanotype photograms are a great activity for kids of all ages that allows them to blend science and art. The science festival participants were able to create cyanotype photograms through the three-dimensional arrangement of objects, e.g., plants, feathers, buttons, and other found objects. After less than a minute of exposure to light from the sun, participants were able to observe the chemical processes taking place on the cyanotype paper. In direct sunlight the exposure process takes 3 to 5 minutes to reach completion. An additional minute or two is needed to develop the paper in water and treat it with hydrogen peroxide. During this time, we were able to describe the iron-based chemistry taking place on the fibers of the paper, discuss some of the early history of photography, and introduce a little-known English scientist named Anna Atkins. Atkins was a botanist who in 1843 self-published the first book illustrated with photographic images, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions.

The library field cares deeply about our professional ethics, and it can be surprising to us that we don’t see a similar relationship to ethics in disciplines beyond our own. The need for ethics in STEM education is perhaps greater and more obvious than ever, yet curricular change can be difficult for institutions. Additionally, in order for librarians to be able to commit to our ethics, we need to begin pressuring many information technology companies to design and build systems ethically and with patron privacy and agency in mind; I believe we can start that work during STEM students’ time at our schools. In this presentation, I will talk about how I have brought ethics to our campus via the library through co-curriculars, book clubs, and partnerships with student groups. Because these activities are outside the standard curriculum, it has been easier and faster to make this change happen.

Recently at the University of Toronto, the decision was made to merge the Astronomy & Astrophysics Library together with the Physics Library into a newly renovated library space. The aftermath of this decision has lead to the cataloguing and weeding of an entire Astronomy Library with the Physics Library soon to follow. Unsurprisingly there are strong opinions from the two departments as to what physical monographs and serials should be kept for the opening of a new library space. How does a librarian balance the wants of stakeholders when the space for collections has been drastically reduced?

How do you proceed when an exciting new initiative falls flat? In this session I’ll share my experiences developing a series of interactive tutorials that students in the capstone engineering design course were to complete prior to a hands-on instruction session… and how the students rebelled against and ultimately derailed this plan for a flipped library instruction session. I have some ideas for next steps that I can share, but I would love to hear your thoughts as well!

This year, the J. Paul Leonard Library at San Francisco State University reorganized from single liaisons to individual departments to a team-to-college structure. I became the head of a three person team supporting our College of Science and Engineering. My two team members are not experienced science librarians, but are enthusiastic. Over the course of the year, we have developed methods to work successfully both collaboratively and independently. I would like to share my experiences with others in similar situations and learn from them how they addressed the challenges of leading a STEM librarian liaison team.