A community-based approach to open science can serve as a model to shift the research ecosystem towards transparency, accessibility, and inclusivity. Believing that libraries have a place in this work, librarians at the University of California, San Francisco, the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University launched the Bay Area Open Science Group (BAOSG), a regional open science community in 2021. BAOSG provides a space for participants to learn about open science, discuss the application and the future of open science in a research context, and meet other members of the community who are interested in (or already are) incorporating open science practices and tools into their work. For the past two years the group has hosted monthly online meetings to bring together students, faculty, and staff and engage with speakers whose work incorporates new approaches to open research, generates ideas, and inspires attendees.

An important part of community building is shifting from one-way dissemination of information to interactive, collaborative engagement and co-creation. In addition to monthly discussions, members of the Bay Area Open Science Group co-created the Open Science Team Agreement template. The template includes short descriptions of several topics including open access, publishing pre-prints, and sharing data and code. Designed for research teams and labs, we encourage users to learn about the topics that interest them, and then edit the document to best suit their research goals. Conversations inspired by the template give groups an opportunity to build community, reflect, update, and codify practices both when on-boarding new team members and as an ongoing accountability measure. The Open Science Team Agreement is also an adaptable tool for librarians who would like to engage in open science and be able to approach research groups with a concrete resource that can serve as a starting point for conversations about library support for these practices.

In this talk we will address the challenges and successes of early-stage community building outside of our typical institutional hierarchies and professional silos. We will place the evolution of the BAOSG in the context of other national and international efforts and provide recommendations for groups considering similar efforts. We will then give attendees an interactive introduction to the Open Science Team Agreement tool as a way to help their researchers and other stakeholders understand and advocate for open science practices within their laboratory, department, or community. We hope this introduction to our group and our resource both elicits feedback for the Team Agreement and encourages attendees to adapt the tool and the approach to start open science conversations with their own research communities.

In this lightning talk, two library workers will describe how the creation of a book display in celebration of Engineers Week in February 2023 reinvigorated relationships between engineering faculty, lab staff, and the library. Our library puts on monthly book displays, and in years past has recognized Engineers Week with a display each February. This year, instead of having a librarian select the books, we brought together voices from across the engineering departments and associated labs by having faculty and staff recommend books for the display. Drawing inspiration from previous work experience in public libraries, we shared those personal recommendations through eye-catching bookmarks placed in each book. In addition to serving as a collaborative, low-risk, high-reward outreach effort, this display also provided an opportunity for targeted collection development from engineering instructors. The presenters, an engineering liaison librarian and a circulation staff member, will take the audience through the process of creating this display, from concept to final product, and they will share a link to the final list of books in the display as part of their talk. The process we share can be adapted to any STEM discipline and may present an example of an initial opportunity for newer STEM librarians to get to know their faculty and a subsequent way for established STEM librarians to reconnect with their constituencies in support of STEM students and folks curious about STEM.

Join Emily Metcalf, a Health Sciences Librarian with no Health Sciences background, to discuss ways to establish trust with students and faculty regardless of your subject area expertise. Not a doctor? Not a problem! You don’t have to be a content expert to share valuable information, teach essential skills, and serve as a guide through the choppy waters of research. All you have to do is communicate your expertise, acknowledge the expertise or your learners, and be open to learning in your teaching space. Come see how one librarian tackles this prospect and consider asking others throughout the conference how they approach this challenge. This lightning talk is presented by a Health Sciences Librarian, but building relationships is something we all work at. As such, the content can be applied to any subject area, including those in which a librarian might be formally educated.

Students, faculty, and staff do not always associate leisure reading with their campus libraries and are often unaware that they have popular (non-academic) books. To build upon my library's Café Collection of popular fiction, I created a virtual popular science collection to highlight general interest non-fiction titles in STEM disciplines to support recreational reading and mental well-being. This lightning talk will cover development of a LibGuide to curate and digitally display the print and electronic popular science books scattered throughout the collection as well as promotion and marketing strategies to increase awareness and usage of this growing collection.

Our STEM library has been experimenting with the idea of "storefronting," or highlighting interesting collections or technology available to students, in or near the library entrance. We hope to both engage with students as they enter, or draw them in from outside. This can be achieved in a variety of ways and in our case we have capitalized on a large window next to the entrance, overlooking a busy hallway.

Science liaison librarians who aim to collaborate closely with their departments strive to comprehend the research interests and needs of scientists. To achieve this, they utilize databases like Scopus to collect information on researchers' publications within their institution. By employing research metrics, librarians can acquire crucial data such as the research topics of faculty publications, the journals in which faculty publish their articles, the most cited paper, the Open Access uptake, the top funding sponsors, and more. By leveraging data visualization tools like Google Looker Studio, librarians can easily deconstruct this information, promptly identify patterns, and prioritize expenditures and collecting practices. This presentation will demonstrate the process of combining Scopus data and Google Looker Studio to generate a dashboard that showcases the academic department's scholarly output. Attendees will be encouraged to use the free tool of Looker Studio to create a similar dashboard for the library databases of their preference.

Bibliometrix (https://www.bibliometrix.org/home/) is an open-source application in the R statistical programming language with an easy-to-use graphical interface called Biblioshiny, which can be used without coding experience. Starting with a download of records from a bibliographic database, it can perform a variety of quantitative analyses showing information such as journal use, network relationships among authors, and subject development over time. I will show how to use Bibliometrix to create research impact visualizations for researchers, examine journal use to inform collection development decisions, and deepen collaborative relationships with campus communities. To follow along using Bibliometrix on your own computer, please see the instructions on this page: https://www.bibliometrix.org/home/index.php/download to install R, the Biblometrix library, and R studio.

Do you build relationships with individual instructors only to find that your involvement in a course ends when they move on? Are you only able to get into some of the sections of a required course? Do you worry that you are teaching students the same content at multiple points in their educational journeys? Performing targeted outreach to course coordinators can ensure you have a permanent position in these important learning environments, and allow you to understand the big picture so that you can scaffold your instruction sessions appropriately.

In this, the Year of Open Science, how can we incorporate elements of open science into STEM library instruction? As STEM librarians we sit at the nexus of information literacy, data literacy, and scholarly communication - areas that overlap into open science! We are uniquely positioned to introduce students to open science concepts and to connect students with open science resources and networks. This presentation will explore ways that librarians can introduce students to open science via library instruction. Open science concepts and practices will be mapped onto the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy and the STEM Companion Document. Example ideas and activities within library instruction will be reviewed, focusing both on scaffolded library instruction within department curricula and support for undergraduate and graduate research. Open science topic examples include: designing science with reproducibility/replication in mind; study pre-registration; opening up data and publications (why and how); and alternatives to traditional peer review. Participants will gain concrete ideas, practical suggestions, and helpful resources.

In the 2022 academic year, Texas A&M University announced a massive reorganization affecting almost every individual working at the University. This change removed faculty from the libraries. In this short storytelling experience, Dianna Morganti will share her transition journey from a newly hired faculty librarian to teaching in the College of Engineering's Multidisciplinary Engineering Department. There she found her multidisciplinary expertise in scholarly communications to be valued as enhancing the curriculum of the College. She designed and taught a course called "Research Lifecycle in Engineering" in her first year, and in this session she will discuss her career transition, the course design experience, and the tools and resources that helped her transition from a one-shot wonder to a semester-long teacher.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was incredibly lucky to be offered a permanent-track position after completing a contract as an academic health sciences librarian. The role? Solo librarian leading the only standalone academic chemistry library in Canada (to my knowledge) and within the largest university in the country. I came into this position with a humanities background, one year of high school chemistry and 1.5 years of professional library experience, and as you can imagine, the imposter syndrome was real. Add to all this an ongoing renovation project and the unpredictability of overseeing a library space during COVID-19, and you have the perfect recipe for an overwhelmed early-career librarian. 2 years into my current role, this informal talk will be a candid reflection on my journey so far, including lessons learned and mistakes made along the way. Finally, I will discuss how colleagues who are generous with their time and wisdom can make all the difference for early-career STEM librarians. I hope that these experiences will resonate with many, from building knowledge of an unfamiliar subject area, to balancing liaison responsibilities with operational tasks and communicating your value to stakeholders beyond the library.

A workplace is made all the richer with a variety of perspectives and experiences. Younger professionals add creativity, enthusiasm, and fresh perspectives to new organizations, while seasoned professionals bring valuable experience and institutional knowledge. A partnership between a young professional and seasoned professional has the potential to be a fruitful and impactful relationship for both individuals.

In the past 2 years, Clarissa Ihssen has started 2 different science librarian positions at two different institutions. In this Storytelling the Profession talk, she will describe her experience building relationships and embedding herself within the STEM community. Topics covered will include outreach and engagement, liaison work, and instruction. Attendees will find this most helpful if they are: interested in being a science librarian, starting their first position, or switching institutions.

During this talk, the presenter will describe their first year as Public Health Liaison to the College of Public Health at the University of Georgia. Prior, the presenter had worked as a liaison to business and psychology at Piedmont College, as well as a Public Librarian with expertise in programming, not to mention a side-hustle in archival arrangement and description. The presenter came into their current position, almost by accident, but it has proved to be a fulfilling experience. Hear about their ups and downs along the way of becoming an accidental health science librarian, and why "going with the flow" has become their mantra to endure in librarianship.

STEM subjects are generally presented as objective bodies of facts about the natural world. This presentation masks that science is historically and currently the domain of white, elite men, and is fueled by their interests and profit motives. Recognizing and destabilizing this hegemonic paradigm of science is essential if we want to put knowledge of the world in service of people & planet over profits, and science librarians are well-placed to educate the next generation of scientists to do so using the tools of critical pedagogy and critical information literacy. In this presentation I will summarize the results of a literature review of critical pedagogy and critical information literacy in STEM librarianship and suggest some ways we can deepen our practice in this area. I look forward to hearing your ideas, too.

I am a sciences librarian who has been teaching an REU course for first- and second-year undergraduate women for nine years and had an opportunity to be involved with my institution’s faculty learning community (FLC): Introduction to Indigenous Pedagogy this academic year (AY23). My motive for applying to this FLC was to take another step in my journey to understand many global issues, many of which cause varying degrees of existential dread in my world. I knew I did not have much awareness or understanding about indigenous knowledge systems, let alone the intersection of indigenous and western knowledge systems, nor how they might apply to my own classroom or in larger discussions with academic colleagues. I wanted to wander another path on my journey to attempt to explore additional pedagogically sound practices and ideas in my own teaching endeavors. In this short presentation I will share with my colleagues the questions this FLC asked of our small membership to ponder and discuss in the hopes that it will raise a drop of awareness/curiosity among those in attendance who may be asking where to start learning and adding to their treasure chest of teaching approaches. I have come to realize that for growth to take place in my own endeavors, I benefit from taking more steps to share my experiences. This alone has been an outcome of my joining the FLC. I will include in this talk specific classroom techniques and assignments I created while participating in this FLC and will appreciate any feedback and discussion that ensue.

Scholars credit Ada Lovelace as the first person to write a computer program, an algorithm with which Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine would calculate the Bernoulli sequence of numbers. There are conferences dedicated to her, but debate continues about her mathematical ability and education, whether she had help on her contributions, her actual contributions to the computer science field overall, and the ramifications of holding her up as a role model for today’s aspiring computer scientists. There are currently many titles dedicated to telling the story of how young Ada pioneered the programming technology that would set forth the course for computer science. Her legacy is prominent in the literature for young readers.

But who came after Ada? What about the stories of those women? Hundreds of women in computer science have been rapidly progressing technology forward for decades and yet it is lovely Ada who inevitably ends up the star of book displays and reading lists for such events as Women’s History Month. It is discrediting to these pioneers as well as readers of all levels to continuously shine the light on a singular person when the history of computer science is complex and intersectional. Lovelace is an important historical figure but only part of a continuing story of women in computing; a spectrum that is the collective inheritance of all who came after her. Libraries need to bolster their collections with hidden stories and more contemporary role models to keep Ada off her singular pedestal and reflect the rich, diverse community of women pioneers. However, many titles are cataloged in history, biographies, women’s studies or other call ranges. This can be confusing for both librarians and patrons alike when searching for titles without specific names. Using “women in technology” or “women in computer science” does not always provide a fruitful search in catalogs as many titles do not include these subject headings. Likewise, it’s difficult to search this topic in vendor catalogs or websites without specific names.

This short presentation will cover the topic of Ada Lovelace and modern women in technology careers from a collection development viewpoint. It will be split into two parts; a brief background on Ada Lovelace (especially why librarians have continuously collected works focusing on her) and a bibliography of books which librarians can implement at once to support inclusion. The bibliography will serve as a planning aid to librarians developing or strengthening collections with diverse books on women in computer science and technology. It will emphasize print books focusing on histories, biographies, fictional and non-fiction works, and juvenile and children’s books. Subjects include pioneers in the field including Ada Lovelace, Katherine Johnson, Grace Hopper, Jean Jennings Bartik, and contemporary leaders. Attendees will be encouraged to submit their own experiences with collection development in this area and other titles they may be aware of for the group's benefit.

How do others find and purchase STEM books from diverse authors? I want my books in my various STEM collection areas to come from a wide variety of voices but I'm struggling to find them. Most of the time I just stumble on books for children. I'd love to know what others do to find these books.

The demand for educational science videos and films continues to grow at our institution. Specific disciplines such as biology and environmental sciences are requesting DVDs or streaming formats, with streaming being preferable for their courses that satisfy copyright requirements and licensed to show in multiple classrooms. Our institution subscribes to Kanopy, but we find the offerings limited and would like to hear what sources and approaches other libraries are using to help them locate legitimate STEM educational videos for their schools. Are videos cataloged in your discovery systems? What are the better third-party providers for STEM videos?

How do you bring up a delicate, complex topic such as copyright and licensing, when you already have limited time to speak and short attention spans for too many emails? There has been an increase in questions around copyright and licensing in the STEM disciplines - newer to me things like responsibilities and opportunities when using code covered under open source licenses as well as the standby questions about what is allowed under resource licenses. As conversations about open access, in both publishing/sharing work as well as adaptation of open access materials, increase in STEM Faculties, the responsibility of STEM liaison librarians to bring forth meaningful contribution to the dialogue increases as well. How do you, my fellow STEM Librarians, talk about and support applications of copyright and licensing in STEM disciplines as part of your professional practice?

Our I Have a Problem sessions are focued on questions, problems, or scenarios related to STEM librarianship (but not personnel problems) that will be discussed by everyone. We want to make space for the attendee community to have discussions. Submit Problems and vote for what we will discuss here.

With the increasing requirements to make scientific research data open and reusable, there is a growing need for researchers to adopt reproducible computational practices not often taught in the scientific disciplines. At an R1 research institution, librarians are seeing an incredible demand for introductory instruction on open source programming tools such as R and Python. In teaming up with our local Carpentries community, librarians have been able to upskill in these areas, receive training on how to teach these tools, and partner with others across campus to provide a series of 2-hour online R and Python workshops introducing researchers to the base platforms as well as different packages and libraries. As in the Carpentries workshops, the library workshops use the code-along active learning technique, as well as online helpers to assist learners. Many of the instructors and helpers in the Python workshops gained confidence in the platform through a library-hosted co-learning community. For the R workshops, we have repurposed sections of the Carpentries open lessons to fit into easier to digest 2-hour sessions. The library workshops have been incredibly popular with graduate students and research staff from many disciplines, and over the series, we build a rapport with the learners. We have seen former participants return to help or teach a workshop the following semester. This lightning talk will discuss the collaboration between librarians and the local Carpentries community, the format of the workshops, and how the series continues to grow a learning community of helpers and instructors.

Each winter at the University of Toronto, the Chemistry Librarian is invited to give an information literacy workshop as part of the laboratory portion of an inorganic chemistry course for 2nd year undergraduates. Students in chemistry courses are often called upon to find data values such as melting point, boiling point, density, and others to support their lab work. Discussions with instructors indicate that students often struggle to find relevant data, and to determine whether the data they do find are accurate and suitable for use in their coursework.

In 2022, the Engineering & Science Library at Queen's University undertook a revitalization of our Science Fiction & Fantasy Collection. This Collection was originally created in 2005 out of a generous donation of about 500 science fiction and fantasy novels; however, due to budget constraints, it was decided that the collection would not be added to. Our ideas about recreational reading collections in academic libraries, and the ways that these collections can support student wellness, have changed significantly over the last 15 years. This lightning talk will highlight those changes while also providing an overview of how we are breathing new life into this collection and the space it occupies in our Engineering & Science Library. Some of our primary goals in this project include diversifying the collection and making it more relevant to the recreational reading preferences of our students, filling gaps in series and ensuring we have seminal works that one would expect to see in a Science Fiction & Fantasy Collection, and completing a minor renovation to turn the space into a destination for students.

Scholarly communication issues such as open access and predatory publishing are often rife with misconceptions, confusion, and frustration among faculty. In the wake of the OSTP mandate requiring federally-funded research to be made immediately freely accessible, a solid understanding of open access and publishing is more important than ever. With the rise of mega-journals and mega-publishers, the line between open access reputable and predatory publishers has become increasingly blurry. As mega-journals have increased journal impact factors through self-citation practices, so has scrutiny surrounding their practices. Informal conversations about hasty peer review practices and aggressive solicitation of manuscripts leaves them in a gray zone on internal journal ranking used by many departments in promotion and tenure decisions. Using an R1 land grant institution as a case study, my presentation will review publication and funding patterns alongside the exponential growth of two mega-publishers and highlight areas for researcher education. Additionally, it will boost librarians’ understanding of the gaps in faculty knowledge about mega-journals and mega-publishers, build confidence in engaging with faculty on this topic.

Many chemistry librarians are likely familiar with chemical identifiers, such as CAS Registry Numbers or InChI strings, that serve as unique IDs for chemicals, which attempts to overcome the challenges in searching the literature, as often a single chemical has many different names. However, less well known and less utilized in literature databases, are unique IDs for minerals, which have similar naming obstacles to chemicals. While there are several classification schemes for minerals, the particular focus of this talk will be on the classification scheme devised by James D. Dana, first published in his book, The System of Mineralogy in 1837. In his lifetime he published 5 editions of this book, and it continued after his death into an 8th edition published in 1997. The system evolved over the decades from a flat scheme, in which each mineral was grouped into families and assigned an integer ID number, into the newer schemes which are hierarchical and the IDs are a series of integers separated with a period. With this arrangement, newly discovered minerals can be more easily slotted in, and established numbers don’t need to be reassigned. It’s also beneficial as the ID can provide information about its mineral families or groups. This presentation will show some example minerals tracked over the course of the classification scheme. Some interesting aspects to examine while looking at how the scheme evolved over time, include tracing mineral discovery, re-classification, and re-naming. On a practical level, knowledge of the schemes can aid in mineral collection maintenance or rescue. Dana numbers are used by collectors, and have been for a long time, therefore older mineral collections could be cataloged, or even arranged by Dana numbers; being aware of what they are, an essential metadata element, is beneficial to that kind of work. Overall the aim of this presentation is to introduce the topic of mineral identifiers to librarians, using chemical identifiers as a launch pad, as they are simply more familiar. Specific focus will be on Dana’s classification scheme, and both modern and historic values of it will be discussed.

This session will explore the results of a study of library support for engineering start-ups on Canadian and U.S. university campuses. The aim of the project was to determine how libraries can better provide support to engineers during the market research stages of development. Innovation in engineering is seeing rapid growth development; however, engineers traditionally do not receive training in business, commerce, or market research. Libraries have long provided services to entrepreneurs and are able to rise above to meet the needs of their growing community of users. For this study, the top 20 universities in each country were chosen, Canada from the Maclean’s list of top engineering schools and the United States from the Times Higher Education’s list of top engineering schools. Both English and French universities were included in the study. The survey focused on identifying schools with start-up competitions and incubators where engineering students were finalists. The results of this study will show a breakdown of the presence of engineers as well as a comparison between the library entrepreneurship resources available at each respective school. While this study is focused on university campuses, the results will help indicate how entrepreneurs are currently being supported and how future programs can be adapted to improve services. This is not only applicable to university libraries, but also to college, public, and special libraries. This session will review the results of the engineering start-up landscape in Canada and the United States and propose early solutions for how librarians can enhance their services to these communities.

Students of the Sciences (or STEM) majors engage the academic library in ways unique to their user group. As a result, it is sometimes difficult to assess the needs of STEM students in the academic library. Our group tackled this need through a passive assessment we dubbed, “Whiteboard Wednesday.” In spring of 2023, we utilized anonymous responses to questions posted to whiteboards in the library to better understand the distinctive needs of the STEM student user groups, including when they are busiest, what library services, resources, and events they utilize, and what they would like to see from the library. With a shoutout on the corner, “Hey STEM students!,” we posted Wednesday’s question and allowed the STEM students to post at their leisure, giving us ample feedback to apply. This presentation will dive into the how’s and the why’s of this underutilized assessment tool and how it is especially useful towards STEM students. We will also discuss what we discovered along the way and how the Whiteboard Wednesday tool can be improved in the future.

Today many new AI tools are being rolled out across many disciplines and business ecosystems worldwide. Two such tools for literature searchers are Research Rabbit AI and Elicit. These automation tools can be leveraged by researchers to easily boost their ability to map literature across subjects, timelines, and to support the automated synthesis for creating literature reviews. We will explore the pros and cons of utilizing these tools compared to traditional search methods that utilize keyword concept mapping, Boolean search operators, and filtering to narrow results.