SOUCABL happened on Thursday, March 7 in a new location, the business school at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. This was spring break at UNCG so I didn’t have to cancel my class to attend.
Sorry – SOUCABL stands for Southern University and College Academic Business Librarians Conference (pronounced, generally, “SO-shuh-bull”)*.
Jean Mays (U. of South Carolina) and Trip Wyckoff (Florida State U.) were the directors for 2024. Jean was of course our host, and Trip is the founder (or one of the founders) of the conference. Additional good people helped plan the event.
I last attended in 2020, just as the pandemic shutdown began. Columbia is a 2.5-hour drive for me, actually closer than some occasional BLINC workshop locations in the North Carolina mountains or at the ocean.
I stayed two nights. We had vendor-sponsored happy hours with heavy hors d’oeuvres Wednesday and Thursday nights, plus free breakfast and lunch on Thursday. The only meal I paid for was my Friday breakfast before driving home. Thank you to the sponsors, and to the conference leaders for recruiting them (great example of this). The networking was great; I made new friends and caught up with old ones.
Like most of the food, registration was free. Around 50 people attended, including the vendor reps. At least one public librarian – Ciera Williams from Durham Public (a BLINC officer) – was there too.
I look forward to next years’ conference, at which I plan to make time to visit one of the Columbia pinball arcades (thank you to Morgan Ritchie-Baum of Wake Forest U. for telling me about the Pinball Map!).
Nancy Lovas (another BLINC officer) (UNC Chapel Hill) and Teddy Stocking (U. of Nevada, Reno) have been researching the rise of regional business librarian groups and conferences. SOUCABL is a good example of this trend. Hopefully they will be able to publish their findings soon.
What I learned at SOUCABL 2024
I have been swamped with research consultations while still providing research workshops (plus teaching my own class), so I’m writing this pretty quickly in my rare free times. The abstracts are posted. Some of the talks were business librarian-specific, some not. Many included a lot of interaction – and not just Mentimeter polls, although we saw both a cool AND useful lesson plan from Jennifer Horne (U. of Kentucky) for a Mentimeter quiz competition involving business database exploration by student teams.
One theme that began with Brittany Champion (Furman U.) and Kayla Davidson (Eastern Kentucky U.): applying different teaching frameworks to business research instruction. TILT, design thinking, and system thinking, for example. Some of these frameworks seemed to be most useful when applied to scholarly communication research (finding journal articles). Applications to “making decisions using data” might be easy or harder; see Ilana Stonebraker writings, one example.
Angel Truesdale (UNC Charlotte) described her success in turning one-shot instruction for a client-consulting class into an embedded presence that included participating in client meetings and attending the final presentations to the client. Outreach and time commitments came up often at the conference.
Neal Baker (Purdue U.) introduced me to the idea of “informed learning”, in which (my take, probably simplistic) information literacy and subject content are integrated – contextualized info lit with practical outcomes for the student’s academic AND career path. The Purdue librarians prefer this concept to the philosophical ACRL Frameworks. It’s not hard to see the value of “informed learning” to business information literacy. In describing Purdue’s big and expensive IMPACT program works, he emphasized the importance of relationship building with the faculty. Then you ask the prof for class time. This connected with Angel’s talk earlier.
Favorite Neal quote: “Yes, we can use big words with faculty, but they want basics, which they think is fabulous.”
Jennifer Horne modeled how to create a mini-focus group. You’re in a class of seniors or final semester graduate students and some students exclaim “I wish I knew we had access to these amazing resources/databases/research tools years ago!”. Respond by asking “Could you tell me what class in your past these databases would have helped you?” Take notes, and then share these regrets/testimonials with the profs of those classes. (I’ve done this with MBA students, since their consulting capstone class is my biggest role in our MBA program, but I should do this in more programs.)
Kristy Cunningham (Austin Peay State U.) shared stories and pictures of physical accessibility issues with her library. She recruited students to tell their stories; those stories helped change minds in Campus Facilities. The stacks in her library – and in mine – will be rebuilt soon to make them ADA compliant.
Jennifer Boettcher (Georgetown U.) discussed how she pushed for writing leave time at her library, where research is not required. (We had similar discussions here regarding our “research days” proposal.) At Georgetown, all library workers can apply for writing leave, very cool.
Right before lunch, we had a series of lightning rounds which I’m not going to fully summarize, my apologies, my energy and attention span were running out. You can see the abstracts for details. Min Tong (U. of Central Florida) went first and began to talk about how she analyzed her consultations as an extremely lean liaison (she has 8,748 business students to take care of on her own). The goal of the analysis was to prioritize her time…and then a test of the alarm system went off in the USC business school…and went off again…and again…with 20 second pauses, for what felt like 10 minutes total. Poor Min. We gave her extra applause at the end.
[By the way, there’s an important article coming out soon in Ticker about a library that confronted a lack of student-centeredness in their liaison subject assignments, and actually did something about it. There’s also going to be a panel at ALA in San Diego in June about this issue. I hope those panelists will write up their discussion somewhere.]
Lunch time at 12:30, whew. Most of us ate outside in the courtyard in the sun, which was lovely. Some of us took a walk to a local coffee shop.
After lunch, Zac Grisham (Miami U.) applied a concept he learned in his recently completed MBA program to subject liaisoning: the utility of time. “Applying business practices to business librarianship” as he put it. This is a ROI calculation to assess the efficiency of the work we do: consulting, instruction, etc. After running the calculation, we can think about prioritization of our work. Lively discussion afterwards! Lots of pros and cons tossed around. No one was falling asleep after our lunch. Zack is working on an article about this and I look forward to it. (This talk connected with Min’s talk.)
Next was a vendors panel. Seven vendor friends were asked:
- How have vendor-librarian relations evolved over the past 5-10 years?
- What are your hopes for the future?
Meanwhile, the librarians were invited to make comments via Menti. Some of the vendors commented on the anonymous comments. A nice format although with seven vendors, we needed more time for this event. Themes from both sides:
- Less national conference attendance
- But love higher-impact networking like at SOUCABL
- More Zoom meetings, very convenient and useful
- Flexibility in everything (pricing, licensing, support) is desired by all
- Vendor top brass doesn’t value or understand the library market. (Alison Agnew from Mintel mentioned that they brought Chad Boeninger (Ohio U.) to Chicago to talk to their C-suite people and it was eye-opening to those people.)
From 3-4pm, the librarians were invited to have short chats with some of the vendors in individual classrooms. I made some new connections and learned some things. (That week, I was trying to negotiate a smaller price increase with one of them, given our budget woes, and it helped to have met that vendor in person for the first time at SOUCABL.)
For 4-5pm, our final official hour, Trip led a “taking stock” wrap-up discussion. He asked everyone in the room to identify one “rose, thorn, and bud” about our day, a SOUCABL tradition, and a best practice for other events. An inclusive and thoughtful time. Common themes from our reflections:
- Networking and building community – essential for our career success and wellbeing too [and there were more to come, see the pix]
- But more time to chat in small groups would have been valuable. [As always, it’s hard to balance the demands for both formal and informal conference programming.]
- Short takes: nicely casual and accessible event, affordable, a good building for this conference, we liked being in-person.
Being a pesky/annoying BLINC member, my “bud” (opportunity) was business librarians from public libraries. I asked if people had noticed that one of us here was a public librarian (Ciera has to leave before this point) and suggested that SOUCABL would be even better with a more diverse mix of business librarians. But I added, yes, there is much value in focusing on the C & A in SOUCABL.
Note from the pictures that people kept hanging out until pretty late that night.
*According to my brilliant wife, who is a linguistics library liaison. She could have given me the international phonetic alphabet characters but I declined the offer.
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